1. Purpose, background, vision, and goals; FAO's interventions and mission

ASIA'S RICE-BASED LIVELIHOOD-SUPPORT SYSTEMS:

STRENGTHENING THEIR ROLE IN LESSENING HUNGER AND RURAL POVERTY THROUGH SUSTAINABLE GROWTH IN AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISES

This document is concerned with the rice-based agricultural systems of Asia. Its purpose is to engender within a knowledgeable and influential readership a heightened awareness of the key features, global importance, and pressing needs of these systems in supporting and sustaining human livelihood and food security during the periods 2002 to 2015 to 2030. These periods are those for which informed estimates have been made for the requirements of Asian agriculture in meeting the food-security and livelihood needs of the projected human populations in order to lessen substantially (by those target dates) the numbers of undernourished adults and children and the levels of poverty. Those estimates derive from several sources, including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Summit, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and FAO.

Within these time-frames, the document identifies a vision and goals (Section 1) and candidate livelihood-oriented activities (Section 5) wherewith national organizations could be supported by FAO to initiate key activities in rice-system production and products utilization - for rice, non-rice crops, and livestock - and in institutional supports. Such activities would initiate within the ongoing national programmes - during Years 2002-2006 - and would seek to assist the marginal and smallholder rice-farm families and the associated rural landless families. The document highlights how progress towards the Year-2015 food-security and poverty-alleviation targets has been less than required, and suggests that this disappointing progress is in part the result of the substantial decline in global assistance to developing-world agriculture during 1989-99.

However, the document recognizes and emphasizes that increased agricultural production - though a necessary condition - is not of itself a sufficient condition for lessening rural poverty, under-nutrition, and rural-urban migration, nor for creating rural employment and strengthening rural livelihoods. These livelihoods depend not on food supply alone, but on complex interactions of social, economic, and natural-resource endowments. Multi-stakeholder multi-agency partnerships of wide range are thus needed to create and supply the support that can help lessen poverty among rice-system smallholder families and correspondingly lessen food insecurity in both rural and urban areas.

For food security, there are responsible forecasts for the increasing requirements for rice during 2003-2030, and responsible expectations that widespread adoption of current and emerging best-practice production procedures can meet those requirements, and can do so with a diminishing demand on biophysical and human resources. The resources thus freed from rice production shall allow diversification of rice-based farming systems and of income-generating employment-creating enterprises.

Other extensive food-and-livelihoods systems in East and South Asia are the upland and the highland mixed farming systems. They, like rice systems, are home to many poor persons, and contribute to those persons' food security. Appropriate programmes are needed for these upland systems. However, and without gainsaying the needs of other Asian farming systems, this document addresses only the rice-based farming systems, with their rice and non-rice crops, their livestock and fish, and their value-adding employment-creating enterprises, and their unique submerged-soil ecological regimes, biodiversity, and environmental challenges.

The rice-based systems do, fortunately, constitute an effective and resilient vehicle wherewith to deliver the wide-range support needed to help lessen national food insecurity and rural poverty. Such supportive programmes would expect to involve public- and private-sector and international agencies, working in partnership with components of civil society and with the rice-system families. FAO's prospective contributions within those programmes would be consistent with its Medium-Term Plan 2002-2007 (FAO 2000a) and with the FAO-assisted Special Programme for Food Security. Those contri-butions would, in particular, be provided within that Medium-Term Plan's initiative for Priority Areas for Inter-disciplinary Action, with their intended value-adding benefit from multi-disciplinarity.

1.1 Rice systems and the lessening of poverty and undernourishment

1.1.1 The rice systems

In several respects, the geographic aggregation and contiguity of the many Asian rice-based farm systems is globally unique. During 5 000 years, the particular feature of bunded, terraced ricefields has allowed a sustainable use of land and of monsoonal rainfall, often of high-intensity. That sustainable usage has come under man-made threat only during the last three decades. Moreover, within those bunded fields, rice cultivars are well adapted to benefit appreciably from the particular soil-chemical regimes that result from prolonged soil submergence.

Similarly, the submerged-soil ecosystem provides a habitat for various indigenous and introduced aquatic species which have economic and nutritive value - particularly to the poorest riceland dwellers - and which contribute to rice-system biodiversity. At the river-basin scale, the aggregations of bunded ricefields provide highly-effective flood-regulatory mechanisms; the cost of replacing such mechanisms by steel and concrete would dwarf national budgets.

These contiguous Asian ricelands extend from Japan and the Solomon Islands in the east to Pakistan and Iran in the west. They are thus within the Asia and Pacific Region of the FAO/UN System - a Region which produces and consumes about 90 percent of the world's rice, and that is home to many extremely poor persons among a population that constitutes 53 percent of the global total. Seventeen Asian countries annually harvest at least 0.6 Mha of rice. They have an aggregate population of 3.2 billion persons; they comprise: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, DPRKorea, RoKorea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Eleven of them are classified as Low-Income Food-Deficit. Twelve of them fall within the two most-severe categories of prevalence-plus-depth of hunger.

The ricelands feature strongly in five of the FAO-delineated agro-ecozones. They feature also in the East-Asian and South-Asian sections in a recent compilation (Dixon et al 2001) of a poverty-interventions-oriented categorization and mapping of the world's major "generic" farming systems.

The ricelands' farming systems - of crops and livestock - have in all major rice-growing countries generated, and continue to sustain, the agricultural infrastructures and the many associated on-farm, off-farm, and non-farm value-adding rural enterprises and services. Indeed, Asian agriculture - including rice-based agriculture - provides much of the raw material needed by (predominantly urban) manufacturing industry. Thus, poor harvests, from whatever cause, can and do impact adversely on nations' commerce, trade, and total economies.

Though some rice systems are practised outwith the contiguous Asian rice-growing belt, their magni-tudes - whether of area, production, or economic value - are insubstantial in comparison with the Asian totals. Moreover, for several countries within the contiguous belt, rice has a cultural and also, though now diminishing, a political dimension. Thus, there are appreciable numbers of rice festivals and rituals. In some dialects, a good-morning greeting translates as "have you eaten rice today?" The issue of rice price is often-times crucial in influencing large urban constituencies during demo-cratic elections. Correspondingly, the issue of rice importation - particularly at local rice-harvest time - is of vital concern to smallholder rice producers. Presidents of populous nations deem it appropriate to participate in "national rice weeks"; and the UN System justifiably discusses whether Year 2003 might be designated as "World Rice Year".

The Asian ricelands support almost 3 billion rice consumers: one-half of the world's population, and more than one-half of its hungry. The intensity of that nutritional support is often very considerable (FAO 2000e, and Table 8 following). It is therefore highly pertinent that responsible estimates, which accommodate likely changes in population, incomes, diets, and the proportion of hungry (FAO 2000d), suggest that the global developing-country demand for rice (predominantly in Asia) shall progress as approximately 540, 665, and 765 Mt/ann (million tonnes per annum) at 1995/97, at 2015, and at 2030.

Asia's ricelands and their supportive rice-buffer stocks thus have a year-on-year and increasing requirement to supply about 600 Mt rice/annum. If during a succession of years the supply should be inadequate, and with a rest-of-the-world rice production of only 60 Mt/ann, then the task of substituting any substantial shortfall by alternative, consumer-acceptable-and-affordable foods shall be immense. The economic and political consequences - in an increasingly globalized world - might be similarly immense. Indeed, global food security is to large extent determined by the rice security of Asia, and by the products of its rice-based systems. A system that is so large and so pro-poor as the rice system has major potential to impact - favourably or adversely - on the world's food security and on its politico-economic stability.

Section 3.5.6 following correspondingly quantifies some of the global impacts of the 1997-99 economic crises in South-East and in North-East Asia. To prevent such future rice shortage and adverse consequences, the remedy, frequently stated in this document, is that the necessary investments in physical and in human resources - which declined drastically during the 1990s - must be substantially increased and sustained.

In aggregate (FAO 2000b), the Asian ricelands - whether "rainfed" (i.e. non-irrigated) or irrigated - have an annual harvest area of» 135 million hectares (Mha). They are tended by perhaps 200-300 million persons, both landed and landless, full-time and part-time. They support about 200 million bovine livestock, and rather fewer small ruminants. They receive (IRRI 1997, FAO 2000d) about one-fifth of the global total of manufactured fertilizer nitrogen.

After the monsoon-season rice harvest, some of the riceland may be occupied by a second and possibly a third rice crop during one farming year. For all Asia, FAO (2000c) indicates that rice-rice and rice-rice-rice sequences may in aggregate occupy 28 Mha of riceland. This document suggests that the rice-wheat and rice-rice-wheat sequences may together occupy another 25 Mha of riceland.

The Asian rice systems have since 1960 helped achieve impressive growth rates in agricultural production. Thus, during 1970-2000 and for all developing Asia, all-cereals production almost doubled, whereas harvest area increased (ADB 2001a) by a mere 4 percent. Moreover, during the decades 1960-2000, unit (real-term) costs of rice production decreased by 30 percent, while rice prices decreased by 40 percent (IRRI 2001a).

A similar global long-term decline 1965-1995 in the real price of food is reported by FAO (2000d): while average grain yield increased from 1.4 to 2.8 t/ha (all grains) and cropping intensity increased x 1.1, such that the land required per unit of food production decreased by 55 percent, the arable land per person decreased by only 42 percent.

Notwithstanding that each individual farm and its household and its farming system is unique, Dixon et al (2001) were able to identify and map - for the developing world - a set of eight "generic" farming systems derived through a grouping of 72 farming systems that are widely practised throughout one or more of FAO's development regions. Within each "generic" system, there is sufficient commonality, both of agronomic and of socio-economic conditions, that system-wide strategies for livelihoods-enhancing interventions can be formulated.

Two of those development regions - East Asia and South Asia - and two of the generic systems - rice-rice-based and rice-wheat-based - are expectedly prominent among the Asian farming systems. All eight generic systems are characterized in terms of their resource potential and by their current level of agricultural intensification and degree of access to services. For each of them, Dixon et al indicate the extent to which each of five candidate strategies is likely to lessen rural hunger and poverty.

Those five strategies comprise: intensification of existing production patterns; diversification of production and processing; expanded herd or farm size; increased off-farm and non-farm income; and exit from agriculture in the particular farming system. The five strategies are not mutually exclusive: intensification of present (perhaps staple-food) production can and does release land and human resources to facilitate farming-system diversification and hence a more-balanced diet or/and increased income and a strengthened livelihood.

The "generic" Asian ricelands, which include lands adjacent to and associated with the rice-rice and rice-wheat fields, are managed and cultivated by some 130 million rice-farm households - nearly two-fifths of the global total of farming households. The members of those households thus constitute no less than one-ninth of the world's population. About 80 million of the rice-farm households are in South Asia; their aggregate population represents one-fifteenth of the world's total - and a considerably higher proportion of the world's poor (Dixon et al 2001).

The rice-based farming systems are with minimal exceptions rurally located. Rural is generally defined as pertaining to communities comprising fewer than 5 000 inhabitants (ADB 2001b, IFAD 2001 - though different criteria may be used by other agencies). Additionally, the term rural implies certain characteristics of political organization, age profile, employment prospects, and access to natural resources (ADB 2001b).

1.1.2 Undernourishment and poverty

In Asia, the rice systems undoubtedly contributed to the lessening of rural and urban hunger and poverty, and to the sustaining of livelihoods. Thus, the number of adequately-nourished persons (via Table 1 following, East Asia and South Asia, and rural and urban, combined) increased from 1.12 B (billion) in 1970 to 2.56 B in 1996. Incomes - as GDP/person, rural and urban combined - almost doubled during 1970-2000 (ADB 2001a). Correspondingly, the number of non-poor persons (East Asia and South Asia, rural and urban, combined) increased from 1.80 B in 1970 to 2.37 B in 1998.

Relatedly, IFAD (2001) reports that as food-staples' yields increased during the 1970s and 1980s, there was a substantial decrease in poverty incidence. IFAD was thus able to affirm that the wheat- and rice-led Green Revolution during 1960-1990 did indeed manifest an excellent anti-poverty record. IFAD correspondingly cautioned that as the rate of staples-yield-increase slackened during the 1990s, so also did the rate of decline in the numbers of poor. There is thereby implication that future increases in the yield and production of the poor persons' staples - including rice - are likely to help lessen poverty, and correspondingly to enhance rural livelihoods.

It is thus pertinent to note the strong similarity in the current (1998-2000) global productions of the three dominant food-security cereals - rice, wheat, and maize - each 580 - 610 Mt/ann. It is noteworthy also that among those three crops, the proportion that is used for poor persons' food is much the highest for rice. And noteworthy that within the Asia-Pacific rice-producing region, their totals are 530 Mt/ann for rice (nine-tenths of the global rice total), 210 Mt/ann (plus 30 Mt/ann imports) for wheat, and 150 Mt/ann for maize (mostly for livestock feed). Relatedly, and excepting richer rice-growing countries and China, livestock products contribute less than one-tenth of dietary-energy requirements. Thus, in dietary terms, as also in social, economic, and ecological terms, the contributions of non-rice crops and of livestock are in the major rice-growing countries dwarfed by those of rice.

However, despite the impressive post-1960 achievements in staples yields, and because of the geographic patterns of agricultural growth and the inequity in access to food caused by lack of purchasing power and/or inefficient distribution of the available food, hunger and poverty still persist in various Asian countries (IFPRI 1999a, UNICEF 2000, FAO 1999a). This concern for continuing hunger - and the reaffirmation of global commitments and of actions to eradicate this hunger - shall be the focus of the June-2002 World Food Summit.

It is thus noteworthy (FAO 1998a, IRRI 2001a, Dixon et al 2001, IFAD 2001, ADB 2001a, World Bank 2001a) that for Asia's rural families, 40 percent of their gainful employment, and 30 percent of their household income - and as much as 40 percent of income in China, and 50 percent in the poorer rice-wheat-farming households of India - derives from non-farm and off-farm activities. Such activities include small-scale trading and service, within-household manufacture, and possibly packaging and transport.

This rural non-farm component is growing faster than the off-farm component (IFAD 2001) and is particularly important for rural women (ADB 2001a). Dixon et al 2001 suggest that in East Asia and in South Asia it shall be access to non-farm income that shall facilitate a substantial part of the poverty reduction that shall be achieved during 2002-2030. Access to non-farm employment and income is especially important in the non-irrigated rice ecosystems - specifically in the lowland areas with unfavourable rainfall regimes, in the (deepwater) floodprone/swampland areas, and in the rice-growing uplands.

Under-nourishment is defined (FAO 2000d) as an insufficiency of calories for basic energy requirements. Under-nutrition comprises both an insufficiency of calories together with an inability, because of health or sanitation constraints, to use maximally those calories that are consumed. In addition to providing calories via consumer-preferred foods, an appropriate diet must also supply a sufficiency of vitamins and trace elements - especially vitamin-A, and iodine, iron, and zinc. There is requirement also that families must have sufficient fuel wherewith to cook the available food. Diets may be strengthened also by combining commonly-available foods in such manner as to exploit beneficial enzyme-mediated synergies.

The persons most vulnerable to undernourishment include (FAO 1999a) rural landless families and the families headed by poor rural women, and within those families particularly the children (infant, pre-school, and adolescent), pregnant and lactating women, the aged, the disabled, and orphans. These poor persons - and poor people generally - depend (IFAD 2001) on low-cost staples for much of their nourishment and also for their farm-derived income.

Undernourishment, and particularly protein-energy undernourishment, in children results in increased infant and pre-age-five mortality. Moreover, the survivors suffer impairment of learning ability in addition to limitations (including "stunting" and "wasting") on physical/biological growth and on life expectancy. The undernourished children are thus less productive and more illness/disability-prone as adults, and the consequential global costs are immense (IFPRI 2000a). Indeed, ADB (2001b) affirms that the proportion of children undernourished is a key indicator of the quality of life of a whole rural community.

Juvenile undernourishment is quantified in terms of physical-growth characteristics: weight and height and "stunting" and "wasting" and "body-mass index" at specific ages during 0-5 years, and assessed in relation to USA-derived norms for means and variances. Experience from China (FAO 1998b) indicates that the prevalence of low weight and stunting is less where incomes are higher, parents are more-educated, and there is general awareness of human nutrition and diet.

Women are more likely to be undernourished than men. In part this may reflect the distribution of food resources within households, which may recognize that a labouring man constitutes human capital that must be adequately maintained. And in part it may indicate that women's specific and well-established dietary requirements for vitamins and micro-nutrients, particularly during pregnancy and breast-feeding, are neither widely understood nor appropriately accommodated within rural communities (FAO 1999a).

Thus, for Bangladesh at 1995, FAO (1998b) reports that 58 percent of pregnant women were anaemic; for India, Singh (2001a) records 82 percent of pregnant women, and 74 percent of pre-school children, as anaemic. South Asia in aggregate is home to about one-half of the world's anaemic women (Singh 2001b, quoting WHO). In China, about one-fourth of the population is Vitamin-A deficient (FAO 1998b). Iodine deficiency is prevalent in almost all Asian rice-growing countries: fortunately it is controllable - and is indeed controlled - by iodized salt.

Nonetheless, economic losses to micro-nutritional deficiencies are immense: estimated as US$ 5 B/ann for South Asia alone (Singh 2001b, quoting IFPRI). Moreover, chronic female undernourishment during childhood and/or adolescence results in women of low body-mass index (BMI). Almost invariably, the children of such women also have low BMI - and the situation is perpetuated.

The causes of juvenile and female undernourishment (IFPRI 2000a, IFAD 2001, ADB 2001b) include local food insecurity, social and economic inequity, and poverty, together implying a lack of purchasing power wherewith to buy available food, inadequate social and health care for mothers and children, and inadequate water and sanitation.

The most-effective means to combat this undernourishment are to achieve substantial growth in National Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and - demonstratively more effective (IFPRI 2000a) than increase in food supply - to educate rural females, both girls and women.

Poverty - as represented by the numbers of persons having less than US$ 1.0 per day (at 1993 purchasing prices) for food, shelter, and other essential needs - currently affects about 1.3 B (billion) persons globally (IFPRI 1995a, UNICEF 2000). Of those 1.3 B persons - of whom about 0.7 B are children and 0.9 B are female (adults or children) - most are undernourished.

In East Asia and the Pacific there were (UK/DFID 2000, ADB 2000a, each quoting World Bank World Development Indicators 2000) at 1990 about 0.45 B poor persons (28 percent of the total population) and at 1998 about 0.28 B (15 percent). Corresponding figures for South Asia were 0.50 B (44 percent of total) and 0.52 B (40 percent).

The positive converses to these preceding statistics are that the numbers and proportions of non-poor at 1990 and at 1998 were for East Asia 1.16 B (72 percent of total) and 1.59 B (85 percent), and for South Asia 0.64 B (56 percent of total) and 0.78 B (60 percent). Nonetheless, a continuing total of about 0.8 billion poor Asian persons is unacceptable.

[However, as cautioned by ADB (2000a) and by IFAD (2001 Boxes 2.4 and 2.5), poverty is variously defined and quantified. It may be defined (ADB 2000a, 2001b Box 2) as "a deprivation of essential assets and opportunities to which every human is entitled". Some definitions include a gender-empowerment aspect. Measurements and enumerations by international agencies often adopt the afore-mentioned US$1.0 per day criterion. IFAD (2001 Box 2.4) summarizes the methodologies for quantifying "consumption poverty".

Some national agencies, and for various valid reasons, use - and from time-to-time revise - their own poverty-assessment criteria. There may thus result very divergent values for the numbers of poor persons as reported by national and by international agencies: at 1997/98, the World-Bank estimate (quoted in ADB 2000a Appendix 1) for China was 225 M (million) - compared to the national statistic of 75 M; with a similar contrast (450 M versus 350 M) for India.]

Nonetheless, enumerations clearly indicate that in most developing countries poverty is predominantly a rural phenomenon - thus affecting communities with fewer than 5 000 inhabitants. Illustratively, for the rural uplands of northern Viet Nam, IFPRI (2000b) reports a Year-2000 income of only US$ 0.21/person.day. Generally, and in several Asian countries, the rural poor comprise more than three-fourths of the national total of poor persons; and of those poor, two-thirds (ADB 2000a Box 1) are women.

Importantly, both IFAD (2001) and Dixon et al (2001) emphasize that "the poor" do not necessarily comprise the same persons year-on-year. IFAD (2001) thus urges that distinctions be made between the differing circumstances and needs of the chronically poor and the transitory poor. For the latter - who may move into and out of poverty in different years and seasons - the provision of insurance and of safety nets can be very helpful.

Goals and targets for the reduction of poverty (rural and urban) throughout Asia were set (and are reproduced in Appendix 2 of ADB 2000a) by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific within its Manila Declaration.

1.1.3 Interventions and resources

Singh (2001b, citing various sources), expresses concern that during 1998-2000 interventions and progress towards the various Year-2015 targets (Manila Declaration, World Food Summit, others) for lessening rural undernourishment and poverty have been worryingly less than required.

Causes perhaps include (Singh 2001b Table 27, quoting IMF 2000 and FAO's Year-2001 analysis Mobilizing Resources to Fight Hunger) a general substantial decline in global assistance - including Development-Bank assistance - to all components of developing-world agriculture during the decade 1987/89 to 1997/99. In South Asia, this decline has been compounded by a rate of government expenditure per agricultural worker that is extremely low (below Sub-Saharan Africa) and decreasing.

This substantial decline has caused anxiety among the international development banks. Thus, ADB (2001b) reports that its loans to support development of agriculture and natural resources, expressed as a proportion of all loans, peaked in the 1980s at 34 percent, thereafter declined to 9 percent at 1997-99, with a slight recovery to 10 percent at 2000; ADB (2001a Appendix 2) describes the decline as alarming.

Similarly, the World Bank (2001a) describes the decline in its lending for agriculture (from 18 percent to 12 percent to 9 percent of total lending during 1990-1995-1999) as precipitous. IFAD (2001) calculates that the absolute value of global aid to agriculture fell by two-thirds during 1987-98.

Among previous interventions that have helped lessen rural poverty, Datt and Ravallion (1995, quoted in FAO 1998b Box C) determined that in India in the early 1990s poverty reduction was facilitated by irrigation, female literacy, and low infant mortality. More recently, (and again for India), the two most-effective poverty-alleviation interventions (IFPRI/World-Bank, Table 20 in Singh 2001a) have been the construction of roads and the sponsoring of agricultural research and development. The next-most-effective have been education and general rural development. Expenditures on irrigation, soil and water, health, and electrification had surprisingly little impact on poverty, though they may have generated other benefits.

For Bangladesh (ADB 2000a Box 4), strengthening human capital had the largest impact on poverty. Investments in physical infrastructure - notably roads and electricity, and in agrotechno-logical research and extension had the next-largest impacts. High potential was recognized for synergies among agriculture, infrastructure, and micro-finance.

Contrarily, in intensely-poor parts of India, Malaysia, and the Philippines, early-1990s programmes of integrated rural development had minimal success in alleviating long-term poverty. But programmes of rural-poor employment - on labour-intensive infrastructure constructions - have since the 1970s lessened rural poverty in Indonesia and in other rice-growing countries (FAO 1998b).

Revealingly, Ravallion and Datt (1996, quoted in FAO 1998b Box C) established that for India growth in the rural economy lessened poverty in both rural and urban areas; conversely, growth in the urban economy did not lessen poverty in rural areas.

Latterly, and recognizing that the strengths of resource-poor families and the assets of communities differ fundamentally from those of resource-rich communities, various agencies commend that pro-hungry and pro-poor programmes should be based upon the strengths, as distinct from the needs, of resource-poor persons.

IFAD (2001) emphasizes the merits of creating multi-stakeholder partnerships, and presents in its Table 6.4 a typology of pro-poor partnerships of various scales and objectives. IFAD urges that such partnerships must seek to use the assets of communities to assist the poor to help themselves escape from poverty. It correspondingly cautions that such partnerships may expect opposition from the non-poor and from "state and local elites", and may thereby expect difficulty in forging "a coalition of the rural poor". Thus, there may often be necessity that the non-poor be included in the partnerships to counter their obstructiveness.

In building on the strengths of rural families and communities, (UK/DFID 2001) urges that develop-ment programmes should focus on the generation of sustainable livelihoods: "the building of social capital should come before the building of roads".

Similarly, ADB (1998) - following pioneering approaches by the Nordic Countries and the World Bank - emphasizes that investment in women is crucial to achieving sustainable development and hence to achieving food security and poverty reduction. The developmental benefits derive from general economic growth that results in large part from a healthier, better-educated workforce that constitutes a sound human-resource foundation. Moreover, in very poor households, females often contribute more than males to the household income.

Investments in women can be and indeed are made within interventions addressing issues in agricultural production, natural-resources management, rural-income generation, and rural micro-finance-services provision. However, Dixon et al (2001) report (from analyses in the late 1980s) that in some countries women farmers suffer legal hindrance in access to micro-finance and to other entitlements, and that as few as 7 percent of female farmers received any agricultural-extension support, and that only 11 percent of extensionists were female.

Thus, the sponsoring of training - assisted by professional "group facilitators" - for female agricultural extensionists may be cited as a worthy investment component within a rural-livelihood investment programme. There is need for caution, and institutional adjustment, however, since there is anecdotal evidence that in many societies the current female extensionists encounter professional gender biases comparable to those endured in the households by their rural sisters.

It is nonetheless increasingly accepted that the 1980s concept that "women need development" is in this new century firmly supplanted by the recognition that "development needs women", and, moreover, that women should be empowered to influence the agenda for that development. Such empowerment - and appreciable income gain - has seemingly been accomplished (IFAD 2001 Box 6.9) in India by the Self-Employed Women's Association and by the Co-operative Development Foundation.

The agenda for development shall need to be mindful of the statistics and projections (Table 1) for the percentage and totals of undernourished persons in East Asia and in South Asia at various dates; the data are for developing countries only, and for adults and children combined, and for rural and urban combined. The 1995/97 total (East + South Asia) of 524 M persons is almost two-thirds of the 791 M global total of undernourished persons. Conversely, the number of adequately-nourished persons at 1995/97 (East + South Asia) was no fewer than 2 560 millions: 83 percent of the total East+South-Asia population. Nonetheless, a total of 524 M undernourished persons is intolerably high.

An association between undernourishment and poverty is, expectedly, evident in the statistics: for East Asia 13 percent undernourished and 15 percent poor; and for South Asia 23 percent undernourished and 40 percent poor. Correspondingly, in both sub-regions, the very poor are highly likely to be the most-severely undernourished.

Table 1: Under-nourishment (percentage and million persons) for East and South Asia: 1970-2030

[Source: FAO 2000d.]

Of the 1995/97 global total of 791 M undernourished persons, 167 M were pre-school children, of whom in East Asia (including South-East Asia) there were 38 M (23 percent of all East-Asian pre-school children), and in South Asia 86 M (49 percent). These numbers are distressingly large. Conversely, the corresponding totals and proportions of adequately-nourished pre-school children at 1995/97 were for East Asia 172 M (77 percent of all pre-school children) and for South Asia 90 M (51 percent). Forecasts for the numbers of undernourished children at Year 2020 are for East Asia 24 M (of whom 16 M in South-East Asia) and for South Asia 64 M (45 M in India).

[Note: for comparison of statistics and projections, and for discussion of proposed programmes - the Asian rice systems are generally located within the geographic areas serviced by the World Bank Regional Divisions for East Asia and Pacific and for South Asia. Additionally, in Table 1 and elsewhere in this text, East Asia includes groups of countries that are in some FAO/RAP compilations grouped as South-East Asia, and as Central and North Asia.]

Encouragingly (and as reflected in the progressions in the data of Table 1), most Asian countries now have per person calorie intake exceeding the food-security threshold of 2 300 kcal/day. Worrisome exceptions are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos and Nepal, each historically low, and DPRKorea - previously having higher calories intake, but recently declined.

Infant mortality rates (UNICEF 2000) for the four first-listed countries are correspondingly high: 60-90 deaths per 1 000 live births, compared to only 5-20 for Malaysia, RoKorea and Sri Lanka, and compared to the Manila-Declaration under-five mortality target of 45.

1.1.4 Rural-urban contrasts and migration - woman-headed households

Poverty is predominantly a rural phenomenon. IFAD (2001) and ADB (2001a Chapter II Box 1) and Dixon et al (2001) correspondingly describe how the assets, entitlements and quality of life of rural dwellers are generally inferior to those of urban dwellers, and are becoming increasingly more so.

Thus, rural children and particularly female children are likely to have less and lower-quality schooling than their rural counterparts. Rural health services, transport, communications, and other entitlements and services are more difficult and/or expensive to provide and maintain in rural (as compared to urban) areas, and are consequently of lower standard.

IFAD (2001 Chapter 7) summarizes: "The heavy biases against rural people in acquiring human assets - especially education and health - are inefficient as well as unjust, and in most cases are not diminishing."

The global human population at Year 2000 is about 6.0 B persons, of whom roughly 1 B are adolescents. The global total is projected to increase during 2000-2015 by about 75 million persons per year, resulting in a Year-2015 total of 7.2 B - of whom 2.1 B in East Asia (two-thirds thereof in China) and 1.7 B in South Asia (three-fourths in India). For most Asian developing countries, populations in 2015 shall be about 30 percent higher than in 2000. Thus, at Year 2010 the global urban population shall exceed the rural population.

Rurally-based agriculture, including fisheries and forests, shall nonetheless be required to meet the food and sustenance needs of both the rural and urban populations; there shall be corresponding need for strengthened facilities for transporting, storing, and marketing these increased food supplies.

Moreover, those urban-dweller food needs are likely to include a higher proportion (as compared to today) of horticultural and livestock products and of edible oils. It is noteworthy (Steinfeld et al 1997) that urban dwellers currently consume more livestock products per person than do rural dwellers.

Of the 75 M person/ann global population increase, 60 M shall be urban dwellers - many of whom shall by migration have transformed themselves from rural poor to urban destitute. Hopefully, and as expressed in FAO (2001a), the more successful among the rural-urban migrants may remit sufficient resources to their home villages to ensure the continued productivity and profitability of the family-based farm enterprises.

Correspondingly, the 15 M person/ann global rural-population increase shall impose increasing pressures on the rural environments and natural resources (Dixon et al 2001, IFAD 2001). Thus, as ADB (2001a) well expresses: "There are substantial challenges in implementing policies that simultaneously and harmoniously address the goals of poverty reduction, rural growth, and sustainable natural-resource management". Such policies shall require also to create rural employment for that portion of the rural-population increment that cannot be absorbed by the on-farm economy.

As observed by ADB (2000a) and by FAO (2000c: Facon, and Zhu re China), a major stimulus to rural-urban migration is the (current) inability of smallholder rice farms and associated enterprises to generate sufficient output and income to support a complete family. Dixon et al (2001) suggest that the progressive decrease in developing-world average farm size roughly counteracts the progressive increase in production per unit area of farm-land, such that farm-derived farm-household income is essentially stagnant. There is also rural-dweller awareness that labourer wages (when obtainable) are higher in conurbations than in villages. Some consequences of the rural-urban migration are that rainfed-rice-system peak-period labour is increasingly provided by women and female children (IRRI-IFAD 2000), and that among the various countries and regions of Asia and the Pacific, the proportion (ADB 2000a Box 1) of woman-headed households ranges from 20 to 40 percent.

The importance of growth in a national economy in bringing women into the workforce, and in enhancing their status and wellbeing, and in reducing poverty and undernourishment and population growth is evidenced by ADB (2000a) and IFAD (2001) analyses for East Asia: during recent decades, increased demand for labour (agricultural and non-agricultural) raised productivity and wages, and expanded public revenues and thus permitted increased allocations to education, healthcare, and infrastructures. The effects on the numbers of undernourished persons are apparent in Table 1.

For eliminating child undernourishment, in developing-Asia generally, ADB (2001a) suggests that the three requisite foundations are: Broad-based economic growth; Growth in agricultural pro-duction; and Investment in education and health".

The Table-1 forecasts for undernourishment - adults and children (FAO 2000d, IFAD 2001, ADB 2001b, IFPRI 1995a) thus derive from combinations of demographic projections with projections for overall and for agricultural economic growth, and for changes in diet and in social, educational, and political circumstances. Complementary forecasts for South Asia (IFPRI 1998a) indicate that with an overall economic growth of 5.5 %/ann during 2002-2020 there shall be 66 M undernourished children in South Asia at Year 2020 if current policies and programmes are sustained but not expanded. However, if South-Asian economic growth attains only 4.0 %/ann, then the number of undernourished children would be unlikely to decrease from 86 M (the current total); there would be corresponding consequences for the numbers of rural poor. Encouragingly, recent forecasts (Table 15, citing ADB 2002) suggest that by Year 2003 overall economic growth rate may in all South-Asian rice-growing countries reach or exceed 5.0 %/ann.

However, the growth rate (2002-2010) for South Asian agriculture was forecast (IFPRI 1998a) to attain only 3 %/ann (lagging behind that of the overall economy). This 3 percent rate is appreciably less than the 5 %/ann increase in poor-persons' income that is estimated to be required to enable such persons to "cross the poverty line" by Year 2010. There shall thus be need for off-farm employment and income, including non-agricultural employment and income, and probably for public safety nets, if South-Asian rates of rural poverty and undernourishment are to be substantially lessened.

In this context, it is emphasized (IFAD 2001) "that transferring resources and assets from urban to rural dwellers, and from rich persons to the rural poor, often advances general economic growth". Similarly, (FAO 2000f) stresses that the cost of a rural workplace is substantially less than the cost of an urban workplace - though ADB (2001b) cautions that urban enterprises will not relocate to rural sites if infrastructures are there inadequate.

1.1.5 Social and agroclimatic influences

Undernourishment is perhaps more influenced by economic and social factors than by climate-defined agro-ecozones. Table 2 lists child undernourishment for three of the dominant rice-system agro-ecozones: FAO AEZs 2, 3, and 6. (These three AEZs, together with AEZs 1, 5, 7, and 8, are usefully mapped in Figure 1 of IRRI 1997.) Table 2 thus indicates, for pre-school children, relatively slight dependence (within South Asia, or within East Asia) on AEZ, but a substantial dependence (South versus East Asia, and among East-Asian countries) on geographic location, and probably on economic/social factors.

Table 2: Child undernourishment (1995-98) as influenced by agro-ecozones in East and South Asia

[Sources: AEZs from FAO; rice-specific aspects from IRRI (1997); and child-nutrition data from UNICEF (2000).]

IFPRI (1995b) hypothesizes that the more fertile lands (agro-ecozones) attracted the highest population densities, and the consequential pressure on the ecozone resources results in substantial undernourishment. Moreover, this high population pressure may interact with ecozone-related diseases (human trypanosomiasis and malaria) to increase further the incidence of under-nutrition.

Additionally, as shall be indicated in this document's chapter 2.1.2, rice systems are usefully characterized in terms of their water regime - whether irrigated, rainfed lowland, rainfed flood-prone/swampland, or rainfed upland. Analyses in chapter 3.1.1 suggest that among rice-growing countries both the intensity of hunger, and the prevalence of poverty, are higher in countries that depend on rainfed (non-irrigated) rice systems for much of their food production. It may thus be that rice-water regime is for rice-based food-production systems a better indicator of undernourishment and poverty than the climate-based agro-ecozones.

1.2 Forecasts: Food requirements and production (including genetic) resources

1.2.1 Food production: Achievements and forecasts

Notwithstanding the real concerns for continuing poverty and undernourishment in Asia, the past achievements of, and the responsible forecasts for, the rice-based livelihood- and food-security-support systems suggest that those systems shall be able to respond successfully to the challenges and the opportunities that shall occur during the oncoming thirty years. In some respects the future challenges to the productive capability of the rice systems shall be less severe than the challenges that were overcome during the past thirty years. Thus, past progress in many Asian countries in increasing the per-person calorie intake up to and much beyond the food-security threshold of 2 300 kcal/day has lessened the requirement for high annual growth in food energy per person. Additionally, projected rates of population increase for 2001-2030 are appreciably less than those experienced during 1990-98.

Consequently, forecasts (FAO 2000d) for the required growth rates (2002-2030, and allowing for projected dietary changes) in production of major foods and food groups are less than those achieved -except possibly for some livestock products, and for food crops in some areas of degrading lands - during recent decades. However, some pertinent caution is expressed in chapter 2.1.1.

Overall, there is confident expectation (FAO 2000d) that there shall be a strong deceleration in the requirement for increased food production. However, there shall be substantially increased demand for livestock feeds - a consequence of the now ongoing "livestock revolution". Notably, for maize at Year 2020 as compared to 2000, Asia's increased (food + feed) requirement - to be met from imports and increased production - is forecast (CIMMYT 2000b, quoting IFPRI) to constitute some 60 percent of the global increase in maize requirement. This 60 percent proportion may be contrasted with Asia's proportion (27 percent only) of global maize production at 1996-99. Significantly, in China at 1995/97, more than two-thirds of all maize grain was fed to livestock; China is expanding also its production of multi-use feed/fodder/food crops such as sweet sorghum.

These several features are illustrated (in summary) in Table 3, where for rice, wheat, maize, soybean, and all food-crops, and globally and for East Asia and South Asia, the annual growth rates in production achieved during 1967-96 are compared with the projected requirements for 1996-2030.

Table 3: Growth rates (%/annun) in production: various crops and regional groupings:

1967-1996 or 1989-1999 (each actual) and 1996-2030 (forecast requirement)

[Notes: Source: FAO 2000d. For rice, the "Developing world" forecast effectively represents All Developing Asia; for wheat, Asia produces about one-third of the global total, and for maize about one-fourth; the growth-rate requirements for wheat and maize in Asia shall be higher than the Developing-World aggregate figures. Forecasts for the 1996-2030 growth rates required for oil crops and for green vegetables generally exceed 2.0 %/ann.]

Encouragingly, the human, biophysical, economic, and technological resources wherewith to address the future challenges are substantially greater than those that were available in the past. Notably, for crops and for livestock and their systems, the necessary diagnostic and management procedures are, or shall be, sufficiently developed and documented that through 2002-2030 the required levels of productivity, production, and hopefully income, shall be achievable.

The welcome expansion (UNESCO via UNICEF 2000) of education - including secondary education - permits expectation that with appropriate pro-grammes of training and extension the rice-system farmers and entrepreneurs of the early twenty-first century shall through enhanced literacy and numeracy be better prepared than their predecessors to take advantage of the available technologies, packages, and systems. Nonetheless, it shall be cautionary to acknowledge that the poorest and most food-insecure - and particularly the rural girls and women and the orphaned survivors of HIV/AIDS victims among them - shall be the last to benefit from this expansion of education and its benefits.

Technologically: for the major field crops, whether for food, feed, fodder, or edible oil and oilmeal, there are strong indications that the various breeding and seed/planting-material multiplication programmes are already developing and releasing and shall continue to develop and release the cultivars that shall be required to meet the expanding and changing needs of the smallholder rice-based cropping systems.

For the rice-farm livestock - particularly for ruminants and poultry - there is similar confidence that quality breeds and stock of specification appropriate to the pertinent ecozones shall be available to support the forecast expansion in milk, meat, and eggs production. However, IFAD (2001) and Dixon et al (2001) highlight the continuing need for vigorous programmes to improve the productivity of those staples on which many poor persons depend.

1.2.2 Future production: Driving forces and sources of growth

The country-specific driving forces that generate the requirements for production increases for the several foods and food products are threefold: (1) population and income growth (notwithstanding the difficulties of making definitive income-growth forecasts); (2) predicted changes in food-consumption patterns - for which reliable projections already exist, importantly in relation to animal: vegetable products balance, both for type and for quantity; and (3) technical-cum-social changes: future productive technologies shall be constrained within increasing concerns/awareness for environmental (agrochemical, land degradation, water pollution) and food safety issues.

These driving forces shall be complemented by market forces: these are likely to include pricing and taxes so as to increase use-efficiencies for water and for fertilizers - particularly if there is a continuation of currently high petroleum-product prices. They shall include also price-competitiveness for exports of rice and other products from rice-based systems. Thus Viet Nam already markets rice at lower price than Thailand, which shall likely respond in terms of quality rather than price. Viet Nam also markets potatoes more competitively than Indonesia - even in Indonesia-neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore.

Sources of growth in production during 2002-2030 for all food crops, including rice and rice-sequenced crops, for East Asia and for South Asia [for these two sub-regions, forecasts (FAO 2000d) are essentially identical] shall derive proportionately from increases in agricultural-land area and in cropping intensity. These sources together contribute 17 percent of forecast growth in food production, compared to 20 percent during 1961-97, and 83 percent from increases in crop yields and from more-efficient post-harvest processing and marketing, compared to 80 percent during 1961-97.

For both East Asia and South Asia, the 17 percent forecast growth ascribed to land area and to cropping intensity shall derive mainly from the latter - resulting predominantly from increases in irrigation facilities and their water-distribution efficiencies - since there shall be relatively little opportunity to increase arable-land area.

However, within East Asia, the statistics are dominated by China: thus while the forecast annual growth rate (1996-2030) for arable land in use is 0.07 %/ann for all East Asia, the corres-ponding rate for East Asia excluding China (essentially South-East Asia) is 0.41 %/ann: representing a 15 percent increase during 34 years. The forecast land-growth rate for South Asia is 0.13 %/ann - effectively all in India.

The FAO (2000d) forecasts acknowledge that for rice irrigation, the economically and environmentally appropriate options have already been utilized, and that more efficient irrigation management procedures for existing facilities are both required and possible; chapter 3.4.2 summarises Asian prospects for irrigated-area expansion. Pertinently, appropriate investments in the rainfed-lowland-rice systems may expect to contribute both to cost-effective increase in rice production and to a lessening of hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation. For rice yield, the implication is that the 1995/97 global-average value (aggregate for irrigated and rainfed systems) of 3.5 t/ha shall need to increase to 4.6 t/ha by 2030.

However, notwithstanding the justifiable emphasis in this report, and in much of the rural livelihoods literature, on crop and livestock yields, IFAD (2001) wisely cautions that for very poor farming households the priority is not yield - but the lessening of risk, and the preservation of their resource base. Nonetheless, the requirements for regional food security do dictate that yields and yield potentials must be raised continually.

Thus, and overall, future increases in Asian rice-system production shall depend strongly on increases in crop and livestock and food products yields per unit land area, and per unit of other natural and human resources, and per unit time and per unit of purchased resources including fertilizers and water. The outlooks for such increases are fortunately encouraging.

Outlooks are similarly encouraged by recent analyses (Singh, Kumar, and Woodhead 2002) that indicate that for eighteen crops in various Indian states the total factor productivity is for all crops, and excepting only a very small minority of states, either constant or increasing. Correspondingly, for the total factor productivity for rice production in India, Singh (2001a, quoting IARI/ACIAR) reports that the effective contributory interventions have been infrastructural constructions, agricultural research and extension, literacy (education), and irrigation.

For all-crops production in Southern China, FAO (1998b, citing World Bank 1997) suggests that research investment and institutional reform comprised the more-effective interventions, while for wheat production in Northern China, effects of institutional reform were paramount. Similarly, for wheat yield in India, the prominent determinants have been irrigation, wheat price, and technologies, and for rice yield: price, technologies, and electrical power. However, for the rice-wheat systems in Bangladesh, IRRI (2001a) reports that agroclimatic and technological factors - and not economic factors - constitute the major determinants of productivity. Similarly for the unfavourable rice-wheat areas in the Indo-Gangetic Plains, IRRI (2001a) concludes that prices of rice and wheat are not dominant constraints to wheat-productivity growth.

For the countries of Indo-China (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Viet Nam), concern has been expressed (FAO 1998b Box A) that the sources of growth may be insufficient to maintain food security and poverty reduction: rural transport and communications and irrigation are deficient (though Cambodia, in particular, has abundant unused land and water), the human capital is at a rudimentary stage of development, and there is, within a general lack of peace and order, a weak enforcement of rights to property and to tenure.

1.2.3 Yield trends and yield-potential increases

The topic of time-trends in crop yields, and particularly for irrigated-rice yields, has in recent years been much subject to analysis: including conjecture (IRRI 2000) that nitrogen may be immobilized by phenols within the lignins that accumulate in continuously submerged soils. Regrettably, there has also been some irresponsible economic analysis concerning rice-yield trends.

Definitively, recent surveys for rice have reported (IRRI 2001a) that "on 75 Mha of irrigated rice farms there is no evidence of rice-yield decline". Likewise, Singh (2001b Table 20, adapting FAO 2000d) indicates that throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, there were consistent annual yield increases of about 45 kg/ha.crop for rice in South-East Asia, and similarly of about 45 kg/ha.crop for wheat in South Asia. Correspondingly, FAO/RAP Indicators for Asia (FAO 2000b, 2001b) indicate that - for almost all Asian rice-growing countries - crop yields and indices of agricultural and of food production - from an essentially constant-area resource base - continued to increase throughout 1995-1999 - notwithstanding El Nino, floods and cyclones, and regional economic crises.

[However, FAO (2001c, 2001d, 2001e) reports that global (and Asian) rice production in Year 2000 was 3 percent less than in 1999 (and less also than the Year-2000 consumption), and 1 percent less in 2001 than in 2000. This decreased production was in part a consequence of slackening consumer demand, and some crop failures, and particularly of declining rice prices: between Years 1997/99 and 2000, the FAO rice-price index declined from 123 to 98 (its lowest value since 1987), and subsequently to 88 in May 2001, with a slight recovery to 90 in August 2001.

But notwithstanding this decreased production, there was sufficient rice surplus during 1998-2000 thatthere were record totals of international rice-food aid, substantial national distributions of rice (free-of-charge) to very poor families, and record contributions to the World Food Programme's International Emergency Food Reserve and to its Relief Action Reserve.]

Crucially, the suspicion of yield declines in long-term experiments for irrigated rice-rice and rice-wheat sequences has been firmly dispelled by a highly competent all-Asia analysis for 30 sites in 9 countries (IRRI 2000, FAO 2001f), from which Greenland (via IRRI 2001a) was able to conclude "so far are as there is any yield-decline in appropriately-fertilized rice in long-term experimental studies, such declines are episodic and atypical". By this author's direct field observation, such reported declines derived sometimes from poor-quality experimentation.

Moreover, in well-conducted long-term rice-fertilization experiments, where rice yield does decline in deliberately under-fertilized treatments, the time-trend in yield should be portrayed not as an (unrealistic) linear decline, but should rather be quantified (Woodhead, in IRRI 1994) through an inverse-sigmoid function. Such function can similarly describe the decline in annual off-shore fish catch in an over-exploited system (BCEOM 2000).

Long-term analyses of time-trends in national-average yields of rice (and of other crops) should necessarily take account of the steadily-decreasing length of time (transplanting/seeding-to-harvest) during which an individual crop utilises the natural and human resources of land, water, solar irradiance, and farmer management and finances. Such analyses should thus be pursued in terms of yield per field day, and not of yield per crop season. Indeed, breeders' and agronomists' analyses of IRRI cultivars and breeding lines and their yield potentials did in earlier years make and publish such analyses.

Table 4: Yield potential of irrigated rice in tropical ecozones: 1970 - 1990 - 2010

[Source: Various.]

Applying this methodology, the tentative analysis in Table 4 constitutes a powerful riposte to the yield-potential-stagnation pessimists. For transplanted rice, the comparisons are even more compelling when determined for days from transplanting to harvest. Yield-per-field-day analyses will also quantify the benefits (as in China - Wang and Guo 1994) of double transplanting (first in seedbed nursery, then in intermediate nursery, whence to the final-harvest field) so as to optimize opportunities, in reliably-irrigated systems and where economic, for rice-rice-rice and rice-rice-wheat and other similarly intensive high-income sequences. Such double transplanting systems may permit also a concentrated and effective control of seedling-stage golden-snail infestations.

For most Asian rice-growing countries, data series for national-average rice yields (irrigated and non-irrigated in aggregate) extend throughout 1960-1999. Such series permit of trend analyses throughout the whole 40-year period and for the component (usually 10-year) segments within that period. For such periods and segments, the yield-trend statistic that is most generally calculated, published, interpreted, and used in policy deliberations is the annual compound growth rate calculated on the assumption that such statistic remains constant throughout the particular period/segment. If for long-term data series this statistic is less for later components than for earlier ones, concerns may (unwarrantedly) be expressed that "there is decline in yield, or decline in the growth rate of yield, or more plausibly - a deterioration in the resource system".

Such concerns usually do not allow for the feature that yields for later time segments may relate to shorter-duration cultivars than those for which yields were recorded during earlier time segments, and that yield/day, representing efficiency of using resources - including genetic and human resources, may have been sustained or even increased.

Nor do such concerns acknowledge the inevitable aspect of diminishing returns - for which some evidence is provided by Siddiq (2000, p.19) in his analyses of the annual rice-yield and wheat-yield growth rates in some Indo-Gangetic rice-wheat districts during 1980-98. Siddiq demonstrates convincingly that in those districts for which initial (1980-82) yields were comparatively high, subsequent yield-growth rates were comparatively less than in those districts for which initial yields were low. Farmers in the districts having higher initial yields may be presumed to have had earlier access to facilities, resources, and technologies that permitted comparatively high yields; FAO (2001a) suggests that in India such districts comprised no more than 10 percent of the total number of districts. Correspondingly, those districts, the great majority, with lower initial yields were subsequently able to achieve comparatively higher growth rates as they in turn gained access to the pertinent technologies and resources - notably irrigation and electricity. For both categories of district, there is implication that as the gap between farm yield and potential yield lessened, so also did the ability to achieve high annual rice- and wheat-yield growth rates.

However, in rice-growing environments having low natural- and economic-resource endowments - notably the rainfed uplands - yields of rice and of non-rice crops do stagnate and/or decline as a result of soil degradation - particularly soil erosion. This still continuing degradation derives not from deliberate choices of farm families - who are well aware of the value of their land resource, but from the prevalence of an array of economic, social, and political pressures (FAO 1999b, Dixon et al 2001).

Against these pressures, well conceived and appropriately long-term-financed interventions that apply proven methods of sustainable and farmer-participatory resource management can expect to prevail. FAO (1999b) and IFAD (2001) cogently argue that appropriate sustainable agricultural resource management (SARM) and/or Improved Land-Management Technology (ILMT) not only conserve and restore fragile resources but also contribute to long-term poverty alleviation. FAO (1999b) correspondingly reasons that a continuance of natural-resource degradation shall threaten the livelihoods of families, and ultimately of nations.

Moreover, recent analyses (Singh, Kumar, and Woodhead 2002) suggest that for some countries there may be well-founded concern that the rice-yield growth rate has slackened more than was previously realized. These analyses, with supplementary graphical smoothing, determined the rice-yield growth rate during each of the six-year segments 1964-70, 1970-76, 1976-82, 1982-88, 1988-1994, and 1994-2000. For India, the sequence of those growth rates was 1.7, 1.7, 2.2, 3.3, 2.5, and 1.4 %/ann. For all-cereals in aggregate, and for the six-year segments 1970-76 through 1994-2000, values were 1.8, 2.6, 3.2, 3.6 and 1.9 %/ann.

Thus in the late 1990s, the growth rates for rice yield and for all-cereals yield, though creditable, are lower than at any time since 1960, and are substantially below their late-1980s respective peaks of 3.3 and 3.6 %/ann. These declines may constitute in part a response to diminishing demand for rice and to inadequate returns to farmers: globally, the Year-2001 world price for rice was the lowest since 1998; and in India, the strategic buffers were fully stocked. This slackening in yield growth rates may result also from several other causes: from a lessening of inputs as farmers responded to falling prices, or from non-increase in inputs where farmers had already optimized their inputs applications, and from some progressive closing of yield gaps in some states.

The 1994-2000 growth rates, at 1.4 %/ann and 1.9 %/ann, are only marginally higher than the forecast human-population growth rate (1996-2010) of 1.3 %/ann. Moreover, a projection of the 1988-2000 trends suggests that each of those growth rates may indeed fall below 1.3 %/ann during 2002-2004. It is therefore perhaps comforting to note that for India, the proportion of rice in the total kcal/person.day is slightly less than one-third, and of all cereals less than three-fifths.

For Bangladesh, however, the proportion of rice in the total kcal/person.day is three-fourths, and of all cereals more than four-fifths. It is thus reassuring that for Bangladesh the rice-yield growth rate during the six-year segments 1964-70 through 1994-2000 was 0.2, 1.4, 2.0, 2.3, 2.6 and 3.4 %/ann. The latter, seemingly increasing values are substantially higher than the forecast human-population growth rate (1996-2010) of 1.5 %/ann. Bangladesh was perhaps some few years later than India in adopting the newer technologies and the free market policies that have contributed to this hopeful situation.

The preceding paragraphs imply that progressive increase throughout 2002-2030 in potential yields for rice and for associated crops shall be required to contribute strongly to the necessary growths in food production. Encouragingly, there is firm indication that the strategies and procedures to achieve such potential-yield increases are already operational and successful.

Thus for rice, "new plant types" have been conceived for irrigated and for rainfed-lowland rice-production systems (IRRI 2001a). The new plant type for irrigated systems is expected to have a yield potential in tropical Asian irrigated ricelands of 12 t/ha - compared to 10 t/ha for the indica-type conventionally-bred cultivars widely grown at 1998-2000. In farmers' fields, this increased potential should result in Asian-average irrigated-rice yield progressing from 5 to 6 t/ha. For rainfed-lowland rice systems, the corresponding new plant type is expected to have a yield potential in tropical regions of 5 - 6 t/ha, and shall be able to survive repeated and prolonged submergence and drought.

For sub-tropical wheat and maize, similarly, new plant types are under development. There is already the capability to choose rice and wheat and maize cultivars of field-durations appropriate to specific cropping systems in particular locations/agroclimates, and to choose cultivars, of various crops, for particular consumer preferences: glutinous/non-glutinous rice; bread and non-bread wheats; maize and oil-crops for feed, fodder, fuel, or food. For rice, the new plant type is already released to farmers in some provinces of China. It is currently undergoing final stages of location-specific evaluation in several other rice-growing countries; and locally adapted versions are expected to be available to those countries' farmers by 2005.

China - where farmers used semi-dwarf rice cultivars before the advent of the Green Revolution - has featured also (FAO 2000e) as the main source of technology and of experience for hybrid rice. Initially, and as a result both of highly competent breeding and science and of government directives and subsidies, hybrid rice helped substantially to raise national-average rice yield by 15 percent during 1985-95 - thereby lessening the pressure on the agricultural-land resource by enabling the area of riceland to decrease from 36 to 32 Mha, while producing sufficient rice for food-security needs. Additionally, hybrid-rice seed-production enterprises created much rural employment (Singh 1997).

However, within the current Agricultural Reform Period, and in consequence of consumers' judgement that hybrid rice has inferior eating quality, and of Chinese farmers' experience that its production was unprofitable, the area of hybrid rice in China, which at 1990 comprised one-half of the total rice area, has in recent years declined (Husain et al 2001). Similarly in other countries there has been farmer and consumer resistance to the adoption of hybrid-rice technology: thus in India, hybrid rice was in 1998 grown commercially on 0.18 Mha only - compared to an expectation of 2.0 Mha.

Conversely, there are currently 0.30 Mha of hybrid rice in Viet Nam, and 0.015 Mha in the Philippines. In Bangladesh, with 0.03 Mha of hybrid rice, initial farmer-participatory trials of China-produced hybrids have indicated a measure of farmer acceptance - in part because of high yield and profitability (Husain et al 2001) - such that farmers have voluntarily extended the initial trials.

Thus, anticipating progress in improving eating quality, then (indica) hybrid rice - with its 15 percent increase in yield potential (Papademitriou, and Duwayri et al, each in FAO 2000c, quoting Khush 1995) - might be expected to be widely used in several tropical regions by 2010. For the sub-tropics, higher-yield-potential japonica hybrids are under cultivation in northern China. Also by 2010, there is reasonable prospect that cultivars shall be available that combine the attributes of the (indica) hybrid rice with those of the new plant type, and which thereby generate a (tropics) yield potential of perhaps 14 t/ha. As a general observation - with particular relevance for natural- and purchased-resources management - it is perhaps worthwhile to recall that high yield potential, and corresponding high on-farm yields, represent a more-efficient and hence more profitable usage (compared to heretofore) of water, nutrients, and solar irradiance.

[FAO, through various technical cooperation projects, has helped provide training, facilities, and genetic materials for hybrid-rice development in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Viet Nam.]

Similarly, for maize and wheat (IFPRI 1998e, CIMMYT 2000a and 2000b) - and to a lesser extent for other rice-system crops - ongoing and new programmes are expected to develop (during 2002-2030) cultivars with the required yield potential. Indeed, maize and wheat hybrids are already in use in several countries, and as with rice, so with tropical maize and wheat, there are programmes to design and develop new plant types.

1.2.4 Applications of biotechnology

For poor persons, there is need to raise the yields of staple food crops; such need may necessitate the introduction of genes from other species. But as IFAD (2001) contends: "Though the scientific (biotechnological) prospects are excellent, they are at present limited by the focus of research on a form of agriculture that caters mainly to rich people in rich countries, and not to the food needs of the world's poor." Helpfully, expanding programmes in China are seeking to redress this imbalance.

It is therefore pertinent to advise that two of the five multi-disciplinary thrusts of FAO's programmes for the Asia-Pacific region respectively address Biotechnology, biosecurity, and biodiversity, and the Rice-based livelihood systems and their role in lessening hunger and rural poverty. The three other thrusts are also relevant to livelihoods and to smallholder agriculture; they address World trade and policy environment; Livestock intensification; and Disasters preparedness and management.

Thus, and notwithstanding the valid concerns of IFAD, the fore-mentioned breeding programmes for rice, for maize and for wheat do include collaborative networks (for Asia) to harness the proven and emerging techniques of biotechnology. For the medium term, crop-genome maps, and procedures of molecular breeding, using gene-pyramiding and gene-marker procedures, should each be available at Year 2010 to support the ongoing breeding programmes. Indeed, for rice, there were already (April 2002) listings of the draft DNA sequences for both the indica and the japonica eco-geographic races. [The ongoing and prospective applications of the biotechnological techniques of embryo rescue, anther culture, molecular-marker-aided selection, transformation (various methods), and DNA finger-printing were listed and described in Singh 1997 and in IRRI 1997 Chapter 6. The April-2002 sequences were determined using the "Whole-Genome Shotgun Technique".]

These breeding programmes - both conventional and biotechnological - shall address not only the issues of yield potential, but also those of biotic and abiotic constraints to yields in specific agro-ecozones. Thus in the nearer term (2002-2005), and for the devastative rice-tungro virus, newly-developed breeding lines and cultivars are likely to provide substantially-increased resistance to the transmission vector (green leaf-hopper) and to the virus itself. For maize, the Asian biotechnology programme expects impact, perhaps by 2010, in producing cultivars suited to the drought-prone infertile uplands. For wheat, there is already a herbicide-resistant (transgenic) cultivar, and there are expectations for cultivars resistant to stem and leaf rusts, spot blotch, and barley yellow dwarf virus, and tolerant of acidic water and soil.

As a contribution to human micro-nutrition, rice cultivars (IRRI 2001a) are now available that contain nutritionally-beneficent concentrations of vitamin-A, or of iodine, of iron, or of zinc. Grain from such cultivars might provide a useful complement to food fortifications in helping combat the human ailments (particularly in poor people) that result from deficiencies in those micro-nutritional entities.

Cultivar development shall contribute also to sustainable and efficient use of production resources. Short-duration and drought-tolerant maize may expect to contribute strongly to the expanding production of livestock feeds in rainfed rice-maize systems. Similarly, there may by Year 2010 be rice cultivars specifically suited to direct seeding - thereby providing opportunity for water economy in an increasingly water-scarce Asia.

Similarly, for economy in fertilizer use, there are N-efficient rice cultivars already available in various countries; wider adoption of such cultivars might be prompted by any substantial and sustained increase in the prices of petroleum products and hence of urea and ammonium fertilizers. By 2020 (or perhaps 2030), there is realistic prospect that rice cultivars shall be available that can fix substantial amounts of atmospheric nitrogen. Thus FAO (2000c, quoting various sources) suggests that there is potential to fix 200 kg N/ha.crop using biotechnology-assisted procedures of induced symbiosis and of transfer to rice of the several nitrogen-fixing (nif) genes. However, it is necessary to be mindful that the incorporation of nif genes may incur an unacceptably high (physiological) rice-yield penalty.

In this context, a 10 t-grain/ha new-plant-type rice crop shall indeed require to accumulate about 200 kg N/ha.season, at a seasonal-average rate of about 2 kg N/ha.day, and at an appreciably higher rate at times of vigorous crop demand for N. Such atmospheric-N-fixing techno-logy would have twin benefits of being a seed-based input with high probability of on-farm adoption, and of lessening nitrogen impacts to the environment. Correspondingly, there would be crucial requirement for a balanced (and substantial) input of non-nitrogen nutrients and micro-nutrients. Box 2 highlights the progressive development of micro-nutrient deficiencies in intensively cropped Asian soils.

For rice for the longer term (2020-30), there is possibility that programmes already ongoing shall have created rice plants that can utilize the C4 rather than the C3 cycle of photosynthesis, bringing prospective increase in individual-leaf photosynthetic efficiency - and hence in crop photosynthesis and in resource-use efficiency, and possibly in yield potential - more notably for non-submerged, rainfed, fields and their marginal farmers.

For upland (non-bunded) ricefields - where purchased-input use is currently minimal - there may by Year 2020 be cultivars that have resistance to rice-blast fungus and that can tolerate/escape drought. Indeed, long-established upland-rice breeding programmes have a new impetus to develop "aerobic rice" cultivars. Significantly, there may also by 2020 be viable cultivars of perennial rice that will both produce grain and also, if contour-planted, provide erosion control on fragile sloping lands: IRRI (2001b) reports that initial breeding materials, of which the "perenniality" parent is Oryza rufi-pogon, should by 2005 be available for evaluation/adaptation by national-system partners. Moreover, some of those initial materials may by unexpected outcome (IRRI 2001b) have photosynthetic rates that are more akin to those of C3 than of C4 plants.

1.3 Natural-resource endowments and pressures

In meeting the production-oriented rice-system challenges, there shall indeed be vital need for major inter-disciplinary efforts and programmes to ensure the conservation and regeneration and rehabilitation of the natural-resource endowments of the ricelands and of adjacent (often fragile) lands. There shall be need also to cope with the increased pollution loads - solid, liquid, and gaseous - and the prospective land and water degradations that shall result from the forecast changes in farming systems and practices. Simultaneously, the rice-dependent communities and enterprises shall encounter both opportunities and challenges as the impacts of world-trade agreements become more intense and widespread.

1.3.1 Land endowments and pressures

For the ricelands' natural-resource endowments, issues of land access, of nutrients and soil management, of water availability, and of sustainability are paramount (ADB 2001a 2001c, World Bank 2001a, Dixon et al 2001, IFAD 2001). Rice area per person was in 1961 about 0.12 ha/person; by 1998 it had decreased to 0.07 ha/person. Average size of rice-farm holding also decreased between those dates - in part, and beneficially in relation to equity and poverty alleviation, through deliberate programmes of land reform/redistribution, and in part, but less beneficially, through inheritance-related over-fragmentation of already-small holdings. [In comparison to a total rice-harvest area of» 135 Mha, the much publicized loss of land to peri-urban development is not serious: even in populous Indonesia, rice-harvest area increased at 1.2 %/ann during 1990 - 2000.]

Rice-production projections to Year 2030 assume that increased productivity and income per unit of land will compensate for decreased land-area/person and for increased land fragmentation, but that immense, externally-assisted, efforts shall be needed to introduce and operate policies that strengthen property and water-use rights, that correct tenurial anomalies, and that promote effective land markets (FAO 2000g, World Bank 2001a) and that provide to the rural landless - and to women (IFAD 2001 Box 3.8) - the means to participate in those markets.

Historically, among East-Asian countries (FAO 1998b Annex 2), Indonesia has re-settled, though not without problems, about 1.5 M landless families from Java in various of its other islands; Malaysia had a similar, though much smaller programme of land allocation to landless families; the Philippines has a long history of land-redistribution programmes, but the proportion of landless tenants and labourers remains high; as it does in Thailand also. In the socialist systems of China and Viet Nam, land ownership is usually retained by the State, but tenancy rights - saleable and/or transferable - can be granted for periods of 20 - 50 years.

For the global environment, global agriculture is a prominent source (FAO 2000d) of nitrate in ground- and surface-water, and of phosphate in waterways. It is a substantial source of ammonia that contributes to acid rain, and hence to tree damage, to eutrophication of ecosystems, and loss of biodiversity; a source also of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. Of the annual anthropogenic atmospheric inputs, agriculture, with rice-lands prominent, contributes about 80 percent of nitrous oxide, and some 40 percent of methane. In the rice-based crop sequences, both the rice and the non-rice crops may, through inappropriate fertilization, contribute to those pollution processes; they may also cause excessive extraction ("mining") of nutrients. Procedures of site-specific nutrient management may help combat these deleterious processes.

Global agriculture is also the largest consumer of diverted water. In rice ecozones, the abstraction and application of some part of that diverted water contributes to soil salinization and to groundwater depletion. Fortunately, improving technologies are expected to contain these problems during the medium term (FAO 1997a, 2000a, 2000d).

In the uplands - including upland ricelands - inappropriate soil management is the cause (Dixon et al 2001) of much soil erosion, and hence of downstream siltation, of mudslides, and of dry-season water scarcity and hence of decreased yields. FAO (1999b) suggests that much previous effort to counter soil erosion in developing countries has been ineffective, and that soils continue to erode. The methodologies of sustainable land management correspondingly urge the adoption, and sponsorship, of the techniques and concepts of "good land husbandry" (including crop-nutritional husbandry) within integrative development programmes that address pertinent institutional and policy aspects and that strengthen efforts in extension and training.

Crucially, such programmes must ensure that the economic benefits accrue to the implementing farm families, and not to off-site (perhaps down-stream) communities, and must ensure also that the implementing families have guaranteed rights of land usage and/or tenure, and hence the incentive to invest their labour and their financial resources.

In the lowlands, the bunded ricefields provide effective soil-erosion control. This feature may in part explain the encouraging statistic (FAO 2000d, quoting Oldeman 1998 and other sources) that during the 45 years 1945-90, Asian crop-land productivity is estimated to have decreased as a consequence of land degradation by only 13percent - little more than the 9percent calculated for Western Europe and North America. Aesthetically, the extensively terraced hillside rice systems maintain a pleasing rural landscape. Agriculture also has the important potential to sequester - as well as to emit - pollutants.

1.3.2 Livestock aspects

Livestock systems (small-scale, and large-scale, and increasingly stall-fed) are forecast (LEAD 1999, FAO 1999c, 2000d) to impose increasingly intensive and extensive pressures - during 2002 to 2030 - on local and global environments. The increase in demand for feeds is likely to be met in large part by coarse grains, for which much of the increased production shall be from rainfed systems - including upland and lowland rainfed-rice-based systems, and perhaps pre-monsoon in some floodprone lands. Some of those rice-system uplands shall be on fragile lands highly susceptible to soil erosion and to losses and mining of nutrients; moreover, a concentration of coarse-grain production is likely to lessen ecosystem biodiversity.

The greater environmental threat from livestock, however, is posed by the animal excreta: whether solid, liquid, or gaseous. Indeed, LEAD (1999) reports that the external costs of these excreta is generally more substantial than previously realised, and that in East Asia excessive applications of animal wastes to farm-lands are already causing nitrate pollution of groundwaters.

For the solid and liquid excreta, management shall expect to be enterprise-size-dependent: in diversified ("mixed") crop/livestock smallholdings, management may expect to recycle much of the material, using improved versions of traditional systems (as in China and elsewhere). Relatedly, LEAD (1999) suggests that strengthened land-tenurial arrangements lessen the adverse, and promote the favourable, environmental impacts.

For the larger, specialised ("industrial") livestock enterprises, which are forecast to become increasingly more numerous - and to make increasing use of concentrate feeds - containment and disposal shall be more technical and costly. Disposal shall be likely to cause soil acidification, shall probably require legislation and enforcement (ADB 2001c), and might expect to adopt and adapt appropriate procedures from developed-world husbandry - including (LEAD 1999) the procedures of "polluter pays" and of "tradeable emissions".

For the gaseous pollutants from livestock exhalations and excreta - products of enteric fermentation, and of breakdown of dung and urine on pastures and croplands and in collection pits - livestock shall contribute dominantly to the increases (2002-2030) in anthropogenic emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, and of ammonia.

Methane emission by livestock - already at Year 2000 a substantial component of anthropogenic methane - is forecast to increase in East and South Asia during 1996-2030 from 21 to 49 Mt/ann (corresponding global totals being 79 and 128 Mt/ann). Proportionate increases in rice-crop methane emissions are forecast to be substantially less than these forecasts for livestock.

For nitrous oxide, livestock-generated emissions are expected to increase globally by about one-half during 1996-2030 (FAO 2000d, adapting from Mosier et al 1996). For anthropogenic ammonia - to which livestock is a major contributor - proportionate increases (2030 compared to 1996) are forecast as x 1.7 for East Asia, and x 2.1 for South Asia, compared to a global average of x 1.6. The differential increases as between East and South Asia reflect differential (forecast) population increases among the types of livestock: major increases in beef cattle/buffalo, sheep/goats, and poultry in East Asia, and in poultry, dairy cattle, and sheep/goats in South Asia. For each of these forecast increases in livestock-generated pollution, some part shall derive from increased numbers in rice-farm livestock.

1.3.3 Land-use, agrochemical and global climate aspects

Rice-farm systems shall also be the victim and the beneficiary, as well as the cause, of future land-use changes and environmental impacts - including climate-change impacts. Thus - and with implication for food security and rural environments - there shall be continuing loss of productive agricultural land to urban, infrastructural, and industrial developments.

Such environmental and food-security impacts may be illustrated (FAO 2000d) by experience in China: food produced heretofore through triple- and double-cropping on southern-provinces productive land that has been lost to agriculture has required to be substituted (but only in part) by food grown in single-crop systems in north-eastern provinces on less-productive (previously pasture) land.

Conversely, the transformation of lowland wetlands - themselves under intense and persistent anthropogenic pressures - into rice-system-lands has, as in China, Indonesia and elsewhere, destroyed the functions and economic values of those wetlands - including their contributions to biodiversity and habitats and to off-shore fisheries. It has lessened also the wetlands' function of flood regulation - which will be restored only, and if at all, by extremely high-cost and environment-unfriendly engineering interventions. And for many low-lying coastal ricelands, whether transformed wetlands or otherwise, the impending sea-level rise shall bring increased salinity and decreased yields.

Pesticide applications, increasing typically at 4 to 5 %/ann, bring mixed blessings to agriculture's environments. Rice-farm operatives and non-target ricefield organisms suffer pesticide-induced morbidity and mortality; and much applied chemical fails to reach the target plant; and the target pests progressively develop resistance to the pesticides.

However, it may be construed that ricefield pesticides in aggregate preserve 10 percent (about 40 Mt/ann) of Asian irrigated-rice production that would otherwise be lost. Thus, foregoing those pesticides would require, at representative yields of 5.0 t/ha, irrigated, and 2.5 t/ha, rainfed-lowland, an additional 16 Mha of irrigation for previously rainfed-lowland riceland - not likely to be constructed imminently - or 16 Mha of new rainfed riceland, if such could be found, to make good the deficit. Alternatively, and assuming, with much doubt, that currently irrigated riceland is sufficiently underfertilized that there might be an incremental 5 kg grain/kg fertilizer-N response to additional nitrogen fertilizer, then the currently-irrigated-rice area would require to receive in aggregate about 8 Mt/ann additional N, or 17 Mt/ann additional urea - compared to the current total of about 33 Mt urea/ann.

None of the three foregoing alternatives seems to be any more environment-friendly than the current pesticide-using technology. It thus seems preferable and probable that improvements in pesticide application should be sought that lessen unnecessary and excess usage. Such improvements may or may not accommodate the feature that genetically modified crops shall provide an opportunity to lessen pesticide applications without loss of yield. It is pertinent that for maize, pepper, rape, soybean, and tomato - each candidate rice-system crops - genetically modified cultivars are already commercially grown in some parts of the world.

Currently, procedures of judicious pesticide use may be encouraged through programmes of taxation, training, improved local-language labelling/instructions on proprietary products, and perhaps through an expected increase in consumer concern for food safety. The methodology of integrated insect-pest management - of which FAO has substantial and successful experience, particularly in Asia - shall be particularly pertinent.

Among benefits brought to agriculture by anthropogenic climate change has been the increase in rates of photosynthesis, and hence of primary productivity of cropland - including riceland, that has resulted from increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. For livestock enterprises, global warming holds prospect that the requirements and costs of animal housing shall in some ecozones be lessened.

Overall, FAO (2000d) opines that the increased environmental stresses that shall result from climate change and from the requirement to increase food production shall be countered by progressive improvements in tropical-agriculture technology and by suitable adaptations of environment-conserving procedures developed and validated in industrialized countries. Introduction of technologies and actions to correct perceived problems would expect to be guided by the Precautionary Principle.

FAO (2000d) also opines that the average effects of climate change (by Year 2030) shall be much less than the effects of economic and technological change - but that tropical and sub-tropical ecosystems, and the poor communities dependent upon them for food security, shall be at risk from increased frequency and severity of extreme events. Strategic aspects of some of these features, and of carbon-sequestration and fuel-biomass production, are re-visited in chapter 4.5.4 of this document.

[The various technical divisions of FAO (2000a) - including their Asia-Pacific-located groups - have vigorous ongoing "regular" programmes, (and support various operational Asia-Pacific networks) wherewith to assist governments and communities to address these several pressures, challenges, and opportunities.]

1.4 Smallholder contributions to food security

1.4.1 Farm-size dynamics

As indicated earlier, average farm size, inclusive of rice and non-rice farms, is decreasing throughout Asia; in India during 1971-1991 it decreased from 2.3 to 1.6 ha. However, a penetrative analysis by Kumar (Singh, Kumar, and Woodhead 2002) quantifies the many positive and beneficial effects of that continuing farm-size change. The analysis demonstrates that though the national-average farm size decreased, this was not the result of the fragmentation of already-small holdings, but represented a net transfer of about 27 Mha of land from units larger than 4.0 ha to those smaller than 4.0 ha.

[IFAD (2001) similarly suggests that: "Concensual land distribution is a promising way forward, with the largest farmers attracted to sell land in small amounts to the poor; but it requires some land fund in support"]

Moreover, Kumar's analysis indicates that because there was higher cropping intensity when the land transferred into smaller-unit operations, the transfer resulted in an increase in the area of "net cropped land" from 160 Mha to 180 Mha. Crucially, as a consequence of the land transfers, the number of holdings of area < 0.5 ha (the sub-marginal holdings, roughly analogous to the "functionally-landless" category in Bangladesh) increased from 23 M (23 million) to 43 M, and the number having area 0.5 - 1.0 ha (the marginal holdings) increased from 13 M to 21 M; the numbers of small- (1.0 - 2.0 ha) and of medium- (2.0 - 4.0 ha) size holdings increased respectively by 10 M and 9 M. That there was not substantial land fragmentation is manifest by the constancy, as between 1971 and 1991, of the average size of holding within each size category: sub-marginal 0.23 ha, marginal 0.73 ha, small 1.4 ha, medium 2.8 ha.

These conclusions may have relevance for other South-Asia countries. It is thus pertinent to list (from FAO 1998b Annex 1) for the South-Asian countries the proportion of cultivated land that is constituted by holdings smaller than 1.0 ha: Bangladesh 20 percent, India 15 percent, Nepal 17 percent, Pakistan 2 percent (only), and Sri Lanka 20 percent [Though for Pakistan, IFAD (2001 Box 3.2) reports that 11 percent of cultivated land area is composed of units smaller than 2.0 ha.]

Notwithstanding its smallness, 0.23 ha of farm-land (roughly half the size of an association-football field) constitutes a powerful resource wherewith a rural-landless family can escape poverty. In which context FAO (1998b Annex 1) reports that South-Asian countries have the following proportions of rural-landless households: Bangladesh 20 percent, India 30 percent, Nepal 18 percent, Pakistan 30 percent, and Sri Lanka 22 percent.

[In India, and probably in other countries also, more than half of the landless families are poor families. For Bangladesh, IFAD (2001) quantifies the inverse correlation between size of land-holding and incidence of poverty. For both South Asia and East Asia, IFAD (2001) reports that a substantial and increasing amount of land is rented and farmed, successfully, by landless families, and that such renting generates rural employment. However, Dixon et al (2001) caution that the practice of share-cropping - wherein landless persons receive a defined portion of the harvest in return for provision of labour to a land-owning farmer - is an impediment to progress and to poverty reduction. Somewhat similarly, IFAD (2001) suggests that for the poor rural landless there is need for a specific research agenda/methodology.]

Importantly, and as stated by Agarwal (1994) and Swaminathan (2000) (each quoted by Singh 2001a): any piece of land, however small, for which a rural family - and particularly the woman of that family - has ownership or confirmed usage rights, is a vital asset in the pursuit of dignity and in the struggle against deprivation and child undernourishment. Similarly, a family that can produce even small amounts of its own calorie requirement - and notwithstanding that it may sell rather than consume some of its most-nutritious products - is correspondingly less likely to be poor and/or hungry (Singh 2001a, Table 16).

Kumar's analyses (Singh, Kumar, and Woodhead 2002) quantified also the extent to which (Indian) farms of differing sizes contributed during 1971-1991 to national food security - both through satisfying some or all of their own household's food requirement, and also through supplying surplus food to the markets and prospectively to the emergency buffer stocks.

Thus between 1971 and 1991 there were the following increases in the percentage contribution to total national production made by farms smaller than 2.0 ha: rice: from 38 to 49 percent; wheat: from 26 to 40 percent; coarse cereals: from 19 to 29 percent; pulses: from 11 to 15 percent; fruits and vegetables: from 43 to 51 percent; food-grains: from 15 to 20 percent; oil-seeds: from 21 to 28 percent; sugarcane: from 29 to 46 percent. The proportions at 1991, when the food-crop production totals were substantially higher than in 1971, are not only higher than in 1971, they are also in all cases appreciable - and increasing. For livestock, smallholder farms (0 - 2.0 ha, aggregated) housed at 1991 about 60 percent of the national populations of cattle, of buffalo, and of sheep, and about 70 percent of goats and pigs.

1.4.2 Smallholdings and national food security

The foregoing percentage proportions for smallholder contributions to crop and livestock production thus highlight a very substantial, indeed vital, component in India's food-security system. Other rice-producing countries that have agricultural-land/agricultural-population ratio (Table 12, this document) comparable to that of India may similarly be benefiting from strong smallholder support to their food-security programmes. For the Philippines, an analysis by Bautista (1997, quoted in FAO 1998b Box C) concluded that had Government during 1965-1980 directed investment and subsidies to smallholder rather than to large-holding farms, poverty reduction and national economic growth would have been substantially greater than actually achieved. To the extent that this smallholder-dynamism feature is not already recognized in national food-security and poverty-alleviation strategies, Section 5 following suggests mechanisms and policies to maximize the production and benefits from smallholder agriculture.

[FAO's Medium-Term Plan (2000a) includes ongoing (and new and expanding) "regular" programmes, including Asia-Pacific-based food-security programmes and a rice-specific support strategy, wherewith to help governments strengthen the productivity and sustainability of smallholder farms and to enhance the livelihood of the smallholder families.]

In identifying mechanisms to maximize the production and benefits from smallholder agriculture, it shall be helpful to note that the fore-listed prominence of smallholdings in Indian crop productions and in livestock populations helps quantify the intensity of crop-livestock synergies. Such synergies shall be immensely helpful in enabling the rice-system farms and the associated rural enterprises to adapt to - and to benefit from - the opportunities and the necessities for producing at 2015 and 2030 the mix of agricultural products, many of high value, that shall be required by the populations' evolving numbers and diets.

Moreover - as emphasized by Steinfeld et al (1997) - smallholder crop-livestock integration provides to farm households the opportunities to intensify production, income, and assets, and to diversify risk; it also serves to promote biodiversity of soil micro-flora and micro-fauna.

Additionally, Kumar (Singh, Kumar, and Woodhead 2002) demonstrated that in India the farms larger than 1.0 ha (the "small", "medium", and "large" farms in aggregate) were, predictably, the source of the marketable food-crop surplus: whether of rice, wheat, coarse cereals, pulses, or oil-seeds. Expectedly, the sub-marginal-size (< 0.5 ha) farms were not (in aggregate) able to generate any marketable food-crop surplus; nor, similarly were the marginal-size farms (0.5 - 1.0 ha). These (< 1.0 ha) households consequently required to purchase food to meet their nutritional needs. In Viet Nam's Red River Delta, however, farms of 0.25-ha average size do generate a marketable rice surplus (IFPRI 2000c).

These differing situations imply that differing rice-price policies would be appropriate within the national strategies that seek to lessen poverty: in India, low food prices, including rice price, would benefit these smallholder households; for smallholders in Viet Nam, high rice prices would be more beneficial. In both countries, the rural landless poor would benefit from low food prices. Rice-pricing and pro-poor policies in other rice-producing countries might similarly be guided by such considerations. Correspondingly, and following the fore-mentioned observations of Agarwal, Singh, and Swaminathan, the policy-oriented question may be posed: Is the developed-world concept of minimal viable farm size relevant and valid in poor-country food-security-paramount rice-based agriculture?

Experience of part-time rice farmers in Japan and RoKorea might suggest that it is not; as also does the observation that Asia's farm families derive much of their employment and their income from non-farm activities. However, Dixon et al (2001) suggest that in developing East Asia many farms are uneconomically small and that land aggregation should be facilitated. Moreover, there is clearly some minimal farm size below which current-type extension services, and perhaps other services also, could not expect to be cost-effective.

Another incisive conclusion from Kumar's (all-India) farm-size-effect analysis (Singh, Kumar, and Woodhead 2002) may also be relevant for other rice-growing countries. That analysis concluded that the smallholder farmers have been equally as innovative as larger-holding farmers in adopting technologies and in using purchased inputs, and more successful in increasing cropping intensity and in applying farm-yard manure to their lands. Such conclusions suggest that smallholders have adequate access, when needed, to micro-financial services - whether from formal or from informal sources.

Correspondingly, IFAD (2001 Box 3.4) synthesizes analyses for several Asian countries that indicate that productivity - on lands of comparable quality - was substantially higher on smaller than on larger farms. Additionally, and importantly for rural-enterprise development and rural-poverty alleviation (IFAD 2001), small farms employ more persons per hectare than do large farms, and smallholders and their employees spend more of their income on employment-intensive non-farm products.

1.5 Management of nutrients, tilth, water and pests

1.5.1 Nutrients management

For nutrients management - whether for individual crops or for sequences of crops - the required procedures, and their interactions with management of plant-population density, of water, and of pests, are well understood in general terms. Additionally, there are emergent methodologies and associated diagnostics to facilitate nutrients management, notably in irrigated-rice systems. These methodologies (described by Dobermann and Fairhurst 2000) include farmer-relevant assessments of indigenous nutrients-supply capacity, within-season nutrient dynamics, and regular replenishment of crop-depleted nutrient and micro-nutrient soil stocks.

Nutrients management is problematic for rainfed ricelands: except in very favourable rainfed-lowland environments, weather-related events and pest occurrences often constrain rainfed-crop growth, resulting in decreased or near-zero response to applied fertilizers. Moreover, the short-term (within-week) fluctuations in field-water status cause difficulty in the planning and in the execution of fertilizers applications. In the rainfed ricelands - and notably in the deepwater (floodprone/swampland) areas, fertilizer applications are understandably much less than in irrigated lands. However, technological and procedural developments during recent years are helping raise productivity in many of the less-constrained rainfed ricelands (IRRI-IFAD 2000), and fertilizer usage is increasing - albeit from a low base.

For both irrigated and rainfed lands, FAO (1998c, 2000a) has acknowledged expertise and experience, and ongoing programmes for documenting and promoting integrated plant-nutrition systems - in which manufactured ("mineral") fertilizers are used in combination with biologically-derived ("organic" - animal or plant) manures. Similarly, SARM methodology (FAO 1999b) comprises an integrated plant-nutrient management - particularly but not exclusively in relation to upland systems. This management uses external inputs to augment the internal nutrient resources and processes, while ensuring minimal damage from external inputs and a maximal application of indigenous knowledge and practices.

Notwithstanding that manure alone - without any mineral-fertilizer augmentation, and without pesticides - can support low-level rice-system production, the consumer demand in Asia for (higher-cost) "organically-produced" food is likely to be constrained by the continuance of poverty and undernourishment. That poverty affects both the purchasing power of prospective buyers, and also creates highly-competitive alternative demands for the manure supplies. However, various Asian NGOs (Deccan Development Society, in FAO-NGO 2000) report some enthusiastic adoption of "organic-food systems" by some resource-poor farmers. Moreover, in some impoverished areas, rice-system production may perforce proceed without agrochemical inputs.

In all rice systems, impediments to the widespread adoption of efficient and environment-friendly nutrients management are the lack of field-visible responses to P and K fertilizers, and the continuing, often-subsidised, low cost of urea-N compared to P and K fertilizers. This notwithstanding the well documented benefits of P and K in conferring some measure of drought tolerance. Moreover, the current low cost of urea-N, and the cost of transporting the water contained in bulky manures, militate against intensive manuring of rice-system crops. "Environmental pricing" of urea-N -adapting policies from industrial-country agriculture - together with integrated plant-nutrient management might be an appropriate procedure for encouraging N-use efficiency in Asian rice systems.

It is here pertinent to emphasize IFAD's (2001) condemnation of misguided - though perhaps well-intentioned - attempts to promote low-inputs/high-output systems (whether for crops or for livestock): if it were indeed possible to defy the laws of thermodynamics, farmers would long ago have done so, and there would have been no need of any Green Revolution. However, as suggested in chapter 2.1.3, there may be niche-specific opportunities for low-input-cost/high-value-product systems.

1.5.2 Tillage and non-tillage

For land management, no-till and reduced-till systems may expect to be adopted increasingly for post-rice non-rice crops during 2002-2015. For post-rice irrigated wheat in the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs, no/decreased-till procedures - including raised-bed procedures - that use four-wheel-tractor-drawn seeders are finding favour with farmers (Rice-Wheat Consortium 2000a). Similarly, availability of mechanization may determine the extent to which decreased-till procedures are adopted for other post-rice crops. In which context IFAD (2001) expresses concern that decreased-tillage procedures shall lessen the demand for (often-impoverished) tillage labourers. For rice, no-till management may to some extent be adopted in Asian upland-rice systems - within integrative SARM procedures - and perhaps by 2020 in combination with perennial rice. [The FAO (2000a) Land and Water Development Division has ongoing programmes for integrated land, water, and nutrient management in upland watersheds - including Asian watersheds.]

For submerged-soil rice, no-till systems might not be adopted widely. However, there are likely to be trends towards dry-soil - rather than wet-soil - pre- and early-monsoon tillage to facilitate dry seeding of rice seeds. The motivation would be water economy. It is expected that the necessary cultivars and land-levelling and drainage techniques shall become more-widely available, and that associated weed, insect, and fungal-disease pests might in future be cost-effectively constrained. However, there are contrary reports (FAO 1999d, IRRI 2001a) as to the productivity of dry-seeding as compared to transplanting.

1.5.3 Rice-systems water

Agriculture - and particularly irrigated-rice cropping - is a dominant user of water: in developing countries it consumes about 75 percent of diverted water - and in Asia 84 percent (Facon, in FAO 2000c), of which about one-half for rice; in South-East Asia, rice comprises more than 90 percent of the irrigated-crop area. However, water per person in Asia (Guerra et al 1998, quoting Gleick 1993) declined by about one-half during 1955-1990, and is forecast to decline by one-third of its 1990 value during 1990-2025.

Thus, countries - globally numbering about 30 - having an annual internally-renewable freshwater availability of 1 000 to 1 600 m3/person.ann are deemed water-stressed (IWMI 2000a: Global Water Scarcity Study). Those of them (about 20) having less than 1 000 m3/person.ann are deemed water-scarce: for those 20, water non-availability is a severe constraint to socio-economic development and environmental quality.

At 2025, and in consequence of water being reallocated from agriculture to industrial, domestic, and environmental uses, Pakistan and parts of China and India shall be classified as "absolutely water-scarce". Parts of Pakistan's rice-wheat zone may already be water-scarce. In peri-urban areas of both Pakistan and Viet Nam (IWMI 2000b, FAO 2000a) domestic waste-water effluent is already used, without fertilizers, to irrigate high-value vegetables, but not rice. Additionally, rice-growing Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Nepal shall require to invest substantially in water-resource development if they are to avoid water constraints; the costs of those investments may need to be recouped - in whole or in part - through increases in food and water prices (FAO 2000c). IFAD (2001) advises that rural-water charges are usually pro-poor, but that "safety nets" may be needed to ease the stress of initiating such charges.

Also pertinent to water resources and their development is the feature that globally - and including Asia's ricelands - about 1.5 B (billion) persons lack potable drinking water (IFPRI 1995c, UNICEF 2000). Of these 1.5 B persons, about 0.5 B reside in rural East Asia, and 0.2 B in rural South Asia (estimates derived from UNICEF 2000).

Correspondingly, 3.3 B persons lack sanitation - with adverse effects on associated drinking-water resources. Of these 3.3 B, about 1.0 B dwell in rural East Asia, and 0.8 B in rural South Asia (derived from UNICEF 2000). For Asia, the Asian Development Bank (ADB 2001c) estimates that poor sanitation and dirty water are the cause of 500 000 infant deaths per year, and also of much illness and disability. Globally, inadequate sanitation results each year in more than 1 B episodes of diarrhoea - inevitably impacting on human wellbeing, nourishment, educational achievement, and productivity. For South-East Asia alone, ADB (2001c) imputes to diarrhoea the deaths of more than one million persons in 1999.

There is legitimate concern that agricultural water-distribution/allocation efficiency is generally low - encouraged by policies of distorted incentives and prices. Globally, more than two-thirds of rice and wheat production currently derive from irrigated land. New sources of water, whether for agricultural or non-agricultural uses, are expensive to develop. Agricultural projections to Year 2030 presume small increases in irrigation availability - augmented by a water-pricing- and user-group- and technology-driven improvement in water-distribution/allocation efficiency.

[FAO's Medium-Term Plan (2000a) allocates appreciable resources to technical and policy aspects of water-use efficiency and water conservation - with substantial activity in Asian ricelands. Correspondingly, strengthening of on-farm water control is featured among the riceland activities of the FAO-facilitated Special Programme for Food Security.]

Similarly, technology is forecast to lessen the incidence and adverse effects of irrigation-induced riceland water-logging, salinization (Kijne et al 1998 prescribe ameliorative procedures - which can be labour-generating - IFAD 2001) and groundwater mining, and of water-supply pollution by agrochemicals. Though desirable for several reasons, the introduction of water pricing may result in food-price increases: there shall thus be need for ameliorative measures for the poor and vulnerable.

1.5.4 Pest and soil constraints

For rice-system pests and adverse-soil-and-climate constraints, food-production projections presume that technological (including cultivar) developments and procedures shall be able to contain, if not decrease, proportional crop losses to the current major pests and constraints. Pest pressures - particularly of weeds, and of pest-insects, and possibly of viruses and of stem/foliar pathogens, and of rats and birds and molluscs - may for rice and non-rice crops increase where rice-sequence cropping is annually repeated on the same land. [IRRI 1997 Chapter 6 lists in its Table 1 the most-damaging ricefield pests, and suggests that in most rice ecozones, and particularly in rainfed ecozones, weeding-labour constitutes a major production cost.]

For rice in high-input irrigated systems, there is proneness to lodging, and possibly a resistance to herbicides. In the less-favourable rainfed lowlands and in the deepwater floodprone/swampland areas, slow drainage of deep (and extensive) excess water shall continue to constitute a major (rice and non-rice) production constraint. However, technological and procedural developments are in some areas helping circumvent this constraint - as in some rainfed ecozones of "water-depth classes" 0.0 - 0.3 m and 0.3 - 1.0 m where high-yield cool-season rice and imaginative cropping patterns are providing productive opportunities (IRRI-IFAD 2000).

For wheat in rice-wheat systems, the herbicide-tolerant weed Phalaris minor, and weather-induced seeding delay, and subsequent high temperatures during grain-filling, both result in decreased yield. Each of these wheat-yield-decreasing constraints can be countered by the raised-bed system of post-rice irrigated-wheat cultivation (Rice-Wheat Consortium 2000a, CIMMYT 2000a, Dixon et al 2001). This system gives benefit also of easier access for operations, together with savings of seeds, water, nitrogen, pesticides, and overall production costs. In all rice systems, post-harvest crop losses can be substantial - particularly for perishable commodities and for upland rice-system farms.

Procedures of integrated (insect-) pest management have been adopted to varying extents in several rice-system ecozones. This cultivar-and-information-and-training-based and livelihoods-oriented management has helped lessen insecticide-induced pest outbreaks and the development of insecticide resistance, and has also helped decrease production costs and operator-health dangers. Similarly, weeds and some bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases can now be managed more effectively than heretofore.

For genetically modified organisms (plant and animal), and for biotechnological pest management procedures, forecasts suggest that by 2030, if not earlier, the issues of human-nutritional and environmental safety shall have been resolved - probably to the benefit of developing world agriculture.

[The FAO (2000a) Medium-Term Plan includes a new priority inter-disciplinary activity to assist member countries on aspects of biosecurity.]

The difficulties of quantifying crop losses to pests are highlighted in the observation of IFPRI (1998d, quoting Oerke et al) that responsible estimates for the losses - at 1988-90, for food and industrial crops, and to all pests - range from 10 percent to 50 percent of potential production. Globally, and for Asia, pathogens, insects, and weeds are estimated to each cause of the order of one-third of the total losses. For rice, IRRI (1997 Chapter 5 Table 3, quoting Evenson et al) suggests that the loss to all pests, aggregated for irrigated and rainfed systems, is about 20 percent of average yield; but, crucially the loss to climatic and soil constraints, both for irrigated and non-irrigated systems, is typically three times larger than the loss to pests.

The lowland-soil constraints in South and in East Asia include salinity - which affects 60 Mha of rice and non-rice lands, and for which tolerant cultivars provide an opportunity for agricultural utilization. Constraints also of iron toxicity (10 Mha), and of high-organic (peat) content (27 Mha); and in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of sodicity/alkalinity, for which reclamation may be accomplished (where cost-effective) through gypsum application in conjunction with appropriate water management. In upland rice-system soils the major (chemical) constraints are aluminium and manganese and iron toxicities, and phosphorus deficiency.

[FAO (2000a) has a regular programme - and facilitates an Asian network - on the amelioration and management of "problem" soils.]

1.6 Vision, goals and prospective interventions

1.6.1 Vision and goals

The vision for Asia's rice-based rural livelihood-support systems here envisaged is thus:

At Yr 2030, and throughout Asia's rice-dependent rural communities, all children (and their mothers) shall be adequately nourished and educated, all desirous adults, female and male, shall be gainfully employed, and all rice-dependent rural families shall reside in environs sufficiently attractive - physically and socially - to counter rural-urban migration, and with their farm resources and common properties managed sustainably and with sufficient resilience to survive calamities.

The corresponding near-term goals (for prospective FAO-assisted interventions) are:

At Year 2005, and in selected impoverished rice ecozones, specific technological and social interventions to achieve the vision shall have been initiated by public, civil society, and private agencies in partnership with FAO and other UN agencies; the current adolescent generation shall perceive progress towards a brighter rural future.

[Following sections introduce goals, objectives, and outputs for specific interventions.]

1.6.2 Objectives, interventions and procedures

In addressing the foregoing vision and goals, FAO's objectives and mission for support to prospective interventions during 2002-2006 for Asia's rice-based livelihood systems would derive from the strategies and thinking presented in FAO's (1999e) Strategic Framework for Years 2000-2015, in its Medium-Term Plan (FAO 2000a), in its (2000g, 2001a) proposed Farming Systems Study for World-Bank Rural Development Strategy, in its analyses of Farming Systems and Poverty (Dixon et al 2001) with its five strategies for improving farm-family livelihoods, and in its commitments within the Special Programme for Food Security (FAO 1999f), and within the UNCED Agenda 21. These objectives and mission would be consistent also with the inter-dependent strategies for five FAO Asia-Pacific region integrated programme thrusts:

• Rice-based livelihood systems and their role in lessening hunger and rural poverty;

• Biotechnology, biosecurity and biodiversity: towards an evergreen revolution;

• Livestock intensification and enterprise;

• World Trade Organization: capacity building, multi-lateral trade, and an enabling policy environment;

• Disasters: early warning, prevention, preparedness and management.

FAO's objectives and mission recognize that agriculture has almost always been the initial engine of wider economic development. However, agriculture has thereby frequently been subject to high taxation and distortive fiscal constraints. In consequence, growth in agriculture has in recent years lagged behind growth in total economies. Nonetheless, and following IFPRI's (1995a) paraphrasing of four items from FAO's 1945 Constitution, it is here emphasized that FAO-assisted rice-system programmes would seek to promote agricultural growth as a means to:

• alleviate rural poverty;

• produce sufficient food and agricultural products to enable food security;

• contribute to national and global economic growth;

• conserve natural resources and improve rural environments - recognizing that over-exploitation of resources is a precursor of their destruction.

In relation those fore-listed items, and recalling the aspects of rice-system water regime, it is here suggested that though all four of those items would be addressed by FAO-assisted interventions in both irrigated and in non-irrigated ricelands, interventions in irrigated systems would be particularly effective in addressing items (2) and (3), while interventions in the rainfed systems (lowland, floodprone/swamp, and upland) would have strong impact in relation to items (1) and (4).

The broad objectives for interventions to be assisted by FAO and partner agencies (national and international, and accessing pertinent comparative advantages) are in the following paragraphs summarized as technological objectives, socio-economic objectives, and institutional and infrastructural objectives. As with all FAO and UN-agency operations, assistance to particular interventions shall be provided only in response to member states' requests - which might expect, in part, to be "demand-driven" by the prospective beneficiaries. To facilitate such requests, it is appropriate that this present document should include a "menu of packages" for prospective interventions.

Such menu is presented in Section 5, where the indicative objectives for particular candidate interventions are reflected in those interventions' descriptive summaries. [Specific objectives for individual candidate interventions - and their expected outcomes/outputs - shall be prepared and published separately.] The menu includes innovative interventions of which farm families could not be expected to be aware, and thus not likely to be foreseen in village/district-level appraisals. It seeks also to take account of opportunities presented through national initiatives to decentralize rural development support, and of lessons learned through previous projects and programmes and their case studies - which can indeed be cautionary!

Candidate technological interventions would thus include objectives for assisting rice-system families (and particularly the resource-poor families) to avail of those primary-production and value-adding opportunities presented by:

• market-driven trends to supplant production of low-value staples by the production of higher-value food, feed, and oil crops, and livestock products - but recognizing poor families' continuing dependence on low-value staples;
  
  
• available and emerging technologies - nationally and internationally generated, and including germplasm - that can incorporate higher-value components within rice-based farming;
  
  
• available and adaptable procedures for rice-system management: including crop-nutrition, and water management - rainfed and irrigated - that balance requirements of sustainable resource use against those of resource conservation;
  
  
• existing incentive programmes for promoting agricultural biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
  

Candidate socio-economic ("wellbeing") livelihoods-oriented interventions - restricted to those for which FAO has expertise and advantage - would include objectives to assist governments to:

• strengthen micro-finance programmes - including informal programmes and urban-rural cash remittances;

• obtain for rice-system communities and enterprises an appropriate set of benefits and safety nets within the emerging patterns and protocols of international trade;

• prepare rural women (through education, information, resources) for their roles in lessening the numbers of low-birth-weight and undernourished children and in managing rice enterprises.

Candidate institutional and infrastructural interventions - restricted to those for which FAO, through its Sustainable Development Department, has comparative advantage - would include objectives for assisting governments at national and especially local levels to:

• implement reforms to the macro-framework that would promote rural interests - including rural social services, institutions, and infrastructures;

• ensure equitable access to resources of land, water, and common properties;

• lessen barriers - such as entry-permit requirements and costs, administrative/legal constraints, and lack of education and information - to co-operatives formation and to off-farm employment by smallholders and landless persons;

• upgrade transport, communications, and economic links to urban and peri-urban markets;

• construct market halls and storage buildings and start-up premises for value-adding enterprises;

• strengthen farm-water supplies.

Procedurally, the proposed interventions would target rural areas having high numbers of poor, undernourished, and vulnerable people. FAO would help locate such targets through the Food Inventory and Vulnerability Information and Mapping System (FIVIMS), with assistance perhaps from the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP). [Though Dixon et al (2001) caution that there is little data wherewith to identify poverty and hunger sub-nationally, M.S. Swaminathan (personal communi-cation 2002) advises that for India there shall in mid-2002 be state-aggregate data for poverty and for the relative sustainability of the underlying food-production systems.]

Operations, probably decentralized, and with a "livelihoods" orientation, would be focussed at village level, and would proceed in partnership with individual farmers and with farmer and enterprise groups - especially women-farmer and women-entrepreneur groups. As and where the target areas have farming systems similar to one of the generic farming systems identified by Dixon et al (2001), candidate interventions could be assessed in terms of one or more of the five types of poverty-reduction strategies enunciated by Dixon et al and previewed earlier:

• Intensify the existing production pattern;

• Diversify the system (with enhanced value-adding and market and product-quality orientations);

• Increase farm size;

• Augment off-farm and non-farm income;

• Quit farming - and migrate to a conurbation.

Wherever possible and appropriate, operations would be associated with the ongoing FAO-assisted Special Programme for Food Security (FAO 1999f) with its four components of endeavour, and with their overlap with the strategies of Dixon et al:

• Identify constraints to the enhancement of production and income;

• Diversify the farming-system enterprises;

• Intensify the production system;

• Strengthen the water-management mechanisms.

Additionally, operations could be supported also by the personnel and resources of the FAO initiative for Priority Areas for Inter-disciplinary Action (PAIAs),

[Already, some of the candidate interventions are providing a "test-bed" for the evolving methodology whereby PAIAs provide the technical and analytic ("normative" in FAO jargon) support to the SPFS "operational" interventions.]

It is thus pertinent to record here the notable success achieved by the SPFS (Special Programme for Food Security) in China. That programme commenced in 1995 in the south-westerly province of Sichuan: a province with appreciable areas of irrigated-rice systems - including rice-wheat systems. The programme was nationally formulated, with substantial participation of the intended beneficiaries, and with government support in the supervision of constructions/refurbishments and in the provision of micro-finance services. The programme has achieved several highly favourable impacts. There has been a substantial improvement in the condition of the natural and of the man-made (including irrigation) resources. There are self-sustaining procedures of micro-finance and of irrigation-system maintenance. Economic rates of return on interventions have been assessed, through internal and external reviews, as 14 - 20 percent. Farm-family incomes have increased appreciably - in large part, and with specific benefit to women - through the programme's diversification component. As a consequence of these impacts and experiences in Sichuan, the government of China has determined that for all provinces the Special-Programme methodology shall be an integral part of its policy to combat hunger and poverty.

In addition to their possible association with SPFS activities, the prospective interventions identified in later sections of this document could be accommodated also within appropriate "thematic groups" of the multi-UN-Agency Administrative Committee on Coordination, and its Network on Rural Development and Food Security and its Sub-Committee on (Human) Nutrition. They could simi-larly be accommodated within the broader mandates of the UN Development Group and of the UN Development Assistance Framework and the UN Joint Consultation Group on Policy. It is note-worthy that many of the concerned agencies, and several national and multi-national agencies, have representation in Bangkok, in close proximity to FAO's Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. Noteworthy also that recent experiences indicate (Dixon et al 2001 World Bank 2001a) success with multi-stakeholder approaches to rural-livelihoods enhancement.

Interventions would necessarily proceed in collaboration with local agricultural-extension personnel, with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), with NGOs and Academia, and with other appropriate agencies; they would expect to feature successful outcomes from recent and ongoing FAO rice-region programmes (including TCTTI, N-Efficiency for Rice, and FARM). Interventionist support would expect to operate for 3 - 5 years, though as is reasoned in FAO 1999b, SARM-type uplands-areas interventions require a longer time-scale, where-after the operational mechanisms - including any micro-finance and market-research/information system should be self-sustaining.

[FAO (2000a), through the Rural Development Division of its Sustainable Development Department, has expertise and experience in designing institutional mechanisms to facilitate multi-stakeholder initiatives.]